| As the large proportion of reading comprehension takes in most tests,it is of great significance in language testing.Similarly,being respectively the highest-level test for English majors and the leading test concerning oversea studies and immigration,Test for English Majors Band Eight(TEM-8)and International English Language Testing System(IELTS)take an influential and major role in language testing field.However,there are few researches on the content analysis of two large-scale tests,even fewer on the comparative analysis of TEM-8 and IELTS.Therefore,this thesis intends to make a comparative analysis on the reading parts in TEM-8 and IELTS aiming to provide inferences for the improvement of content validity.Based on Bachman’s task characteristics and the related language testing and reading testing theories,this thesis makes a comparative analysis of the reading text from the perspectives of input and expected response by content analysis,providing relevant indices of textual complexity and reading ability,which intends to provide validity reference.The author has gathered the latest six reading tests in TEM-8,24 reading passages in total and 8 tests in IELTS,24 reading passages in total.With the assistance of the computational tool Readability analyzer 1.0,Range etc.,the passages are processed and the data are analyzed and processed by SPSS for further research.Finally based on the results got from the computational tool and manual counting,conclusion will be reached.The research indicates that the reading comprehension in both TEM-8 and IELTS have relatively high content validity,but synthesize the characteristics of vocabulary,text length,readability,topic etc.,IELTS has higher textual complexity while from the perspective of expected response,the reading part in IELTS test has evaluated students’ability in both subjective and objective question forms in language use domain,which is of higher truthfulness.While the reading subtests in TEM-8 prefer to test students’comprehensive ability on processing language knowledge and cultivating cultural awareness,which is of high comprehensiveness.Although limitation still exists,the author expects that on the basis of the specific data analysis,the major differences between the reading part in TEM-8 and IELTS would be uncovered,thus providing implication for the test designer for improving test quality and provide positive backwash effect for English teaching and learning. |
