Relating Other Language Proficiency Scales To College English Curriculum Requirements

Language proficiency scales have a guiding effect over language education and language testing.In recent years,many countries and regions have designed their own language proficiency scales,among which the most influential one was the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages(CEFR)developed by the Council of Europe(2001),which was well researched on its validity and its relation to the other language proficiency scales.In China,instructional documents and language proficiency scales for different educational periods have also been published.The College English Curriculum Requirements(CECR)(Department of Higher Education of Ministry of Education of the PRC,2007)has been a popular research topic in the field of language education and language testing owing to its relation to the CET4 and CET6.It has also been studied about its relation to and effect received from the CEFR in recent years,while there was still a lack of empirical research based on quantified data both in validation of the level discrimination in CECR and in the relation between CECR and CEFR.In this research,a descriptor bank was built by collecting descriptors of different language proficiency scales,based on which a questionnaire was developed towards college English teachers.The teachers were asked to rate the descriptors in the questionnaire by their difficulty according to the language proficiency standards for Chinese non-English-major college students.The ratings were used as raw data to be analyzed with Rasch model,which was widely used in the field of language proficiency scales.Results were obtained about the difficulty of the descriptors in our language proficiency scales,and their relation to the other language proficiency scales on difficulty.The results showed that the descriptors in the language proficiency scales of CECR were rated differently from their original levels set in the document,and there were neither clear boundaries between different levels of the CECR,nor clear boundaries between the CECR and the High School English Curriculum Standars;comparing the difficulty of the CECR descriptors to other language proficiency scales,it is revealed that the levels matched differently according to the language skills described.Therefore,in the refinement of the CECR in the future,more attention are needed on quantifying the difficulty of the descriptors and setting cut off points between different levels reasonably.Also,it is important to familiar the English teachers with the language proficiency scales.