The Practicality Of The Guidelines For Language Testing Fairness Review

In recent years, more and more language testing professionals begin to focus their attention on test fairness research and it strikes us as satisfied that more and more results come out. However, the results are quite piecemeal and a set of practical guidelines for fairness review isn’t in existence up to now. A set of practical guidelines for fairness review, which means a lot to fairness study, can lessen the subjectivity and the unnecessary disputes between test developers and test reviewers in the course of fairness review. In addition, they can also make the reviewer’s conclusion more persuasive. On account of the significance of the fairness review guidelines, the thesis first establishes a set of fairness review guidelines and then applies them to the fairness study of CETs. In simple terms, this thesis aims at judging the fairness of CETs and the practicality of the guidelines established in the thesis.After the review of the relevant theories and a full consideration of the whole testing process, the thesis establishes six fairness review guidelines, which takes in a test’s reliability, validity, practicality, authenticity, washback and test use. In order to investigate the fairness of CETs from those six guidelines, the thesis employs five research methods. They are:the questionnaire, the interview, the analysis of the test syllabuses and previous test booklets; real-life observations and the analysis of an existing paper about the writing scoring of CET-4.Based on the results obtained from those research methods, six conclusions are drawn. They are:(1)the reliability of CETs needs improving; (2) CETs are both content and construct valid but their face validity needs further improvements; (3) CETs are not practical enough; (4) CETs are authentic; (5) CETs do not exert a negative influence on teaching and learning; (6) CETs are not used properly.Finally, the six conclusions lead to three major findings of this thesis. They are:(1) When judged from content validity, construct validity, authenticity and washback, the fairness of CETs is satisfactory; (2) When judged from reliability, face validity, practicality, and test use, the fairness of CETs is not satisfactory; (3) The guidelines for fairness review established in the thesis are practical.