A Study On Content Validity Of Reading Comprehension Section In Graduation English Test For Senior Middle School Students

According to the requirements of new curriculum standard for English teaching(2003) and test, the author is about to analyze the very popular exam in high school: High School Achievement Test. It is going to take the exam as the research material and analyze the content validity of reading part of high school achievement test. This paper tries to give some suggestions and to improve the validity of the reading test by analyzing the present situation.This article is emphatically from the view of the new curriculum standard(2003) to analyze the content validity of reading part in high school achievement test. The author analyze and evaluate the ten sets of reading part of the high school achievement test that selected randomly from the following aspects: reading skills, the style of reading materials, the topic and the text difficulty.In terms of the reading skills and topic, the author analyze whether the reading part of the ten sets of the exam paper meet the standards of the curriculum standard(2003), whether the genre distribution of the reading materials is reasonable, and whether the questions are close to the genre of the reading materials, whether the text level is conform to the stage. As a team of six people, the author analyzed the reading materials in accordance with the same criteria separately then unifies the ideas. The team will talk about the divergences together until come to a conclusion.Through the analysis and evaluation, the author found that: First, the reading parts have their own characteristics, but in general, they all can reflect the new curriculum standard well and investigate students’ reading ability. Second, through the analysis of text difficulty, the author found that the reading quantity is moderate. And to some extent, the difficulty of the reading materials has fit the requirements of the curriculum standard. Third, a wide variety of the styles and topics of the reading materials are all meet the requirements of the curriculum standard. Some reading materials are close to the current affairs, it can help students to use English in practice. At the end of this paper, the problems were mentioned, and this article will also give some suggestion on the senior high school teaching and make a request to the English test. Then the article explains the limitations and the future research directions according to the research.