A Study On Validity Of 2011-2014 Jiangsu National Matriculation English Test (NMET)

NMT (National Matriculation Test) exerts a great influence on the fates of thousands of testees in China, and the scientificness of NMET papers has always been widely concerned. Therefore, how the quality of 2011-2014 Jiangsu NMET papers is attracts great attention.As for the scientific language testing, reliability and validity are two important indicators for language testing. Moreover, validity has been regarded as the core standard to measure the quality of a test. Taking all these into consideration, construct validity is analyzed based on Bachman’s Communicative Testing Theory; face validity and content validity are analyzed based on 2011-2014 Jiangsu NMET Specifications and English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools. Besides, the interview survey about 4 experienced English teachers in senior 3 in a senior high school is conducted for the suggestions of English teaching and the strategies to deal with Jiangsu NMET.The research result shows:the face validity of objective tests, including listening, multiple choices, cloze and reading comprehension is lower than that of subjective tests, including task-based reading and writing; as a whole, the content validity is relatively high for being made based on 2011-2014 Jiangsu NMET Specifications and English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools; grammar competence, textual competence, pragmatic competence and strategic competence are all checked, so the construct validity is relatively high for being made based on Bachman’s Communicative Testing Theory.However, the research also exposes some problems:the proportion for detailed information questions in 2011-2014 Jiangsu NMET listening tests is much larger; 2011-2014 multiple choice tests emphasize more on students’grammar knowledge than on words or fixed collocations and idioms; the vocabulary category in 2011-2014 Jiangsu NMET cloze tests is checked unevenly and the proportion of adverbs is the smallest; 2011-2014 Jiangsu NMET reading comprehension tests have problems like too high requirement for reading speed, relatively high difficulty for reading articles and themes about history & geography not involved in recent 4 years etc.; as for 2011-2014 Jiangsu NMET task-based reading tests, content validity in 2011 is the lowest; the new-type writing based on reading material in 2014 is more difficult than ever.In the concluding part, some suggestions about the design of Jiangsu NMET and for English teaching in senior high school are put forward.