A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis Of The Gender Representation In English Testing

English testing serves as an essential source for students to receive knowledge,acquire language skills,and accept social norms and values.The culture of testing materials embodied in English tests assimilates and spreads the authoritative system of concepts,knowledge and values of a certain society.National Matriculation English Test(hereafter NMET)is a national standardized language test implemented by National Education Examination Authority.As a college entrance English test in China,NMET is the largest standardized norm-referenced English proficiency test.It is a high-stake examination which can make inference about test taker's English language ability in college admission decisions.With the emphasis on studying the imparity,injustice,bias and prejudice,etc.in language,Critical Discourse Analysis(hereafter CDA)corresponds to the study on disclosing the hidden social problems(e.g.gender bias)in language testing.Previous studies focus more on different performances of female and male students and critical analysis of other education materials like English textbooks,etc.and few systematic critical discourse studies focus on testing texts.Thus,all the texts in the past NMET examination papers ranging from 2006 to 2016 are collected and formed a corpus named CNMET Corpus with 80 texts totally 19,771 words,which is a diachronic study on NMET as well.According to Hellinger and BuBmann's(2001)study on words classification of gender bias in English,this research applies quantitative methods to analyzing CNMET Corpus by using Corpus Linguistics(hereafter CL)tools.Then,the gender representation of NMET is analyzed based on Fairclough's understanding of analyzing discourse in three-dimensional model.And the present study intends to address the following questions:(1)Does the corpus of NMET manifest gender inequality of English language and to what extent does it exist?(2)How are females and males portrayed in the corpus of NMET in terms of lexical gender,“false gender” and social gender?(3)If gender bias does exist in NMET,what implications and suggestions can be brought from the results of the research for students,educators,test developers and compilers?The present study finds the following results:Firstly,the terms of lexical gender(i.e.terms with specific [female] or [male] semantic property)occur unequally in CNMET Corpus.Female proper nouns,female nouns,female pronouns and female address terms occur fewer than male ones.Secondly,male generics which are used to refer to males as well as females or gender-unidentified persons are still frequently used in the corpus of NMET.Thirdly,in studying the gender orientation of the terms of social gender in CNMET Corpus,the occupations collocated with males are not only various but highly-paid and high-skilled.Females' life is confined to low-skilled occupations,housework and children-caring.What's more,the portrayal of females pays more attention to tender or weak characteristics.However,males are often portrayed as persons with clever and strong characteristics,and they are often involved in earning money or success,etc..The existence of female invisibility,masculism and gender occupational and character stereotypes reveals that in NMET gender bias does exist.The representation of the two genders in CNMET Corpus also serves ideological functions.All above these are barriers in the formation of the learners' gender cognition and affect the fairness of NMET,which needs immediate attention of educators and test developers and compilers.Not just the developers and compilers of NMET,but writers of all other English tests need to pay attention to gender fairness of the testing papers.