Quality Analysis Of Reading Comprehension Part Of BEC And CNBECT

With the development of globalization,the development of business English course and the training of business English talents have become more and more important.Thus,the business English tests play a very important role in measuring candidates' business English ability.Cambridge English-Business Certificate developed by University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations belongs to a proficiency test.This test provides a progressive way to develop Business English ability.Chinese National Business English Test designed by China Association of International Trade belongs to a proficiency test used for testing the commercial ability and commercial knowledge.The thesis analyzes the quality of the reading comprehension part of the two tests,points out their problems and provides some constructive suggestions for business English reading comprehension tests,which can be used for improving the quality of business English reading comprehension test.The thesis analyze the quality of the reading comprehension part of the two tests through four aspect:reliability,validity,item facility and discrimination.The researcher chooses the official paper of BEC and CNBECT respectively by using the method of random sampling and takes two examinations one naturally occurring class of business English department in Hubei University of Technology.Then the researcher analyzes the results of the two examinations.By calculating spilt-half reliability,the coefficient represents the reliability of the test.The result shows the consistence between items.Validity analysis which is used for analyzing whether the tests fulfill the content need to be tested,in this part,this paper mainly analyzes the face validity,content validity and construct validity.Item facility analysis uses two points difficult to calculate it.Based on the formula,the item facility of the two tests can be obtained.According to the pass rate of high score group and low score group,the discrimination can be get respectively.According to analyzing these data,the quality of the each reading comprehension test can be shown.According the results of the study,the reading comprehension part of the BEC and CNBECT are equipped with reliability and validity.Through item facility and discrimination analysis,the items in the reading comprehension part of the two tests are in high quality.Based on the results,the researcher finds that both BEC and CNBECT meet the requirements of proficiency test.However,the design of the reading comprehension tests of the two tests needs to be improved.The designer should pay more attention on diversity of texts and items.In addition,the researcher also gives some suggestions on the designing of reading comprehension of business English tests which should include two elements: one is language ability;the other one is basic business knowledge.Specifically,firstly,the types of the passage should be various;secondly,the passages and the tasks in the test should be authentic;thirdly,the techniques used in the tasks should be varied,it is possible to measure candidates' business English reading ability in the round through different techniques.