A Study Of English Textual Competence Scale For Chinese Middle School Students Based On Cohesion Theory

Language proficiency scale is a series of description of language users' certain language ability. Overseas researches on language proficiency scale have a long history and have reached a mature stage.But until now, there is still no nationwide English competence scale in our country. Domestic studies lay much emphasis on introducing the procedures and methods in the establishment of foreigners' language proficiency scales, or discussing their advantages and defects. Therefore,building a nationwide English competence scale is an important task for our foreign language education. Under the background that Chinese Ministry of Education is committed to constructing China Standards of English, this thesis, taking middle school students as the target group,explores how to develop an English Textual Competence Scale for middle school students.Based on Bachman's Communicative Language Ability Theory and Halliday's Cohesion Theory, this study probes into the construction of English Textual Competence Scale for Chinese middle school students,by using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The two issues planned to deal with are listed below: (1)What dimensions can English Textual Competence Scale for Chinese middle school students be sorted into? (2)What are the levels of the scale?To fine the answers to the above questions, we take the following research procedures: collecting and editing descriptors, classifying and scaling the descriptors. Literature research is used in the collection process. First of all, we widely collect relevant descriptors that involve description of English textual cohesion from curriculum standards, test syllabuses and language competence scales. Then the author compiles these descriptors collected in a form of "can-do” statements by adopting some methods such as translating, rewriting, splitting and combining, and by complying with five principles of positiveness, definiteness, clarity,brevity and independence, and a three-element model. The classification of descriptors is based on Halliday's Cohesion Theory, and also the actual situation of descriptors is referred to to determine the five categories of these descriptors. As for the grading of descriptors, they are firstly graded by the author herself, taking their original positions into consideration.Afterwards, a questionnaire survey, with scoring mode of Likert-type scale, is conducted with some teachers. Finally, questionnaire data are quantitatively analyzed by Multi-facet Rasch model to set the levels of descriptors.Research results are as follows: (1) English Textual Competence Scale for Chinese middle school students is divided into overall description, conjunction, lexical cohesion, reference and substitution five dimensions,each containing 26, 42, 11,20 and 3 descriptors with a total count of 102; (2) The scale of English Textual Competence for Chinese middle school students is ranked into basic, intermediate and advanced three levels,with 24, 48 and 30 descriptors into each level. It is expected that our research would offer some guidance to English learning, teaching and assessment of Chinese middle school students, and also provides some reference for the establishment of China Standards of English.