Aligning Chinese Non-english Major Sophomores’ English Proficiency With CEFR

This paper develops on the purpose of aligning the English proficiency of Chinese non-English major sophomores with Common European Framework of Reference for Languages(CEFR).CEFR is a popularly used and widely influencing measurement tool for teaching,learning and assessment internationally.It has established a set of workable and effective evaluating criteria for educational and testing institutions all over the world.China is one of the CEFR-applied countries.Nevertheless,Chinese research mainly focuses on aligning Chinese proficiency and tests with CEFR instead of aligning English proficiency and tests at home with CEFR.In addition,the author of this paper finds that there is no research aligning the English proficiency of Chinese non-English major sophomores with CEFR.Thus,this paper aims at exploring this aspect.To begin with,this study made an initial alignment between the CEFR and Chinese non-English major sophomores based on the previous studies and the descriptors taken from College English Curriculum Requirements.After careful alignment,Chinese non-English major sophomores’ English proficiency was estimated situated at B1 level of CEFR.To justify this assumption,an empirical study was then conducted.Investigating materials mainly referred to questionnaires.In total 152 descriptors covering A2,B1 and B2 of the CEFR were included in four questionnaires.Each of the four questionnaires included 50 descriptors.In each questionnaire,the first 16 items were the same,which were anchor items for the data equating used for quantitative analysis later.The remaining 136 descriptors were distributed randomly in the four questionnaires.Four teachers and 269 students from three different universities participated in this study.Before filling in the questionnaires,a rater(teacher)and ratee(student)training was held to make them familiar with how to fulfill this task as well as possible.After filling out the questionnaire,four teachers and eight students were interviewed.The interviewing process was recorded.The interview questions were mainly related to how they thought when they made choices after each descriptor.After data collection,Winsteps,the software developed based on the Rasch model was adopted as the way to equate the four questionnaires.The item difficulties of the 152 descriptors came out after equating.Based on the analysis of item difficulties of 152 descriptors,the interview recordings helped to clarify the ambiguous items.The clarification confirmed at which level of CEFR the students’ English proficiency was generally situated and how their four competences developed.These four competences refer to listening,speaking,reading and writing.Finally,after the quantitative and the qualitative analysis,the initial assumption was verified.The non-English sophomores’ general English proficiency turns out to be mainly situated at B1 level of the CEFR.However,their listening,speaking,reading and writing competences develop unevenly.Specifically,their reading competence is better than B1 level,their writing competence is just rightly situated at B1 level,and their listening and speaking competences appear to be weaker than B1 level.