A Study On The Scale Of EGC For Chinese Middle School Students

There have been a lot of researches on language proficiency scales abroad while most studies in China tend to introduce the methods and procedures of making foreign language proficiency scales or simply discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Actually, only a few researches have explored how to construct language proficiency scales. Besides, with regard to English grammatical competence(EGC), previous researches mainly focus on the relationship between EGC and grammatical knowledge or pragmatic competence or making surveys of students’ EGC in different stages. There are few researches that have connected EGC with language proficiency scales. Under the background of developing China Standards of English, the author combines EGC with language proficiency scales and takes Chinese middle school students as subject to explore how to construct the scale of EGC.Based on the theory of Bachman’s Communicative Language Ability(CLA) and Larsen-freeman’s Three-dimensional Grammar Framework, this thesis, adopting qualitative and quantitative methods, investigate the following two questions:(1) What are the dimensions of EGC scale for Chinese middle school students?(2) What are the levels of EGC scale for Chinese middle school students? To probe into the above questions, the author takes the following steps: first of all, 207 descriptors that can reflect English ability of middle school students are gathered widely from language proficiency scales, curriculum standards, teaching and testing syllabuses, English textbooks and so on at home and abroad. However, descriptors are found to be various in ways of expression and specificity of contents.Therefore, this thesis, referring to the previous principles for editing descriptors, takes the measures of deletion, packing, unpacking and translation to revise the descriptors. Followed by the first stage, the author expounds form, meaning and use based on the calibrated descriptors and classifies them into corresponding dimension. Later, intra-rater’s correlation and inter-raters’ consistency have been used to judge the rationality of dimensions. Finally, based on sources of descriptors and the author’s experience, edited descriptors are divided into five levels. Thirty-two experienced middle school English teachers are invited to participate in the research. The results are analyzed by Multifacet Rasch Model(MFRM) and in this way, the levels of descriptors are set ultimately.Through the study, it is found that,(1) EGC for Chinese middle school students can be described from three dimensions, namely, form, meaning and use. The number of descriptors in each dimension is 23, 26 and 57 respectively;(2) there are three levels of the scale of EGC and they are low, intermediate and advanced levels, which are the same in each dimension. Meanwhile, descriptors are balanced in each level from the perspective of each dimension. The results also indicate that the collection and editing of descriptors are the basis of building the scale of EGC for Chinese middle school students. The descriptors must be comprehensive, representative and authoritative in sources and should be definite, clear, brief, independent and positive in expression. What’s more, classification and scaling are key steps for the construction of EGC scale. Classification should be based on solid theoretical foundations while scaling needs to be supported by qualitative and quantitative data in order to guarantee the validity of the scale. Hopefully, the scale of EGC for Chinese middle school students can provide certain guidance for language teaching and also has some value of reference for the construction of China Standards of English.