A Study Of The CET4 Reading Comprehension From Communicative Language Testing Perspective

Since the beginning of the 21st century when the new College English Curriculum Requirements was carried out, English teachers have been increasingly attaching great significance to the competence of their students to communicate with others in English. Actually, such change with the English teaching was the result of introducing the theories and hypothesis of western scholars and one of the most famous theories to emphasize the communicative competence of language learners is the theory about communicative language test, which was established by Bachaman, Palmer and other famous linguistics and scholars. At present, this theory has attracted large amount of attention but the researches to investigate English exams from the aspect of the communicative language test are still limited. That is exactly the major concern of this thesis. To be specific, in this thesis, the reading comprehension in CET 4 in the past five years are evaluated from the aspect of the parameters of communicative language tests. The analysis of the reading comprehension in the selected test papers lead to the following conclusion:At first, in most cases, the designers of reading comprehension could observe the authenticity principle but they might violate such a principle when there are conflicts between the authenticity and the competence of college students and the purposes of CET 4.Secondly, the interactiveness of reading comprehension in CET4 could be guaranteed since the three kinds of questions in reading comprehension have been designed properly in accordance with the competence of college students.Thirdly, the designers of reading comprehension in CET 4 have designed the questions properly so that the college students could depend on both the internal and external context to find the correct answers.Such findings could help college English teachers to get some clues about how to guarantee the efficiency of reading comprehension in CET 4.