The Study On The Content Validity Of English Reading Comprehension Of National Matriculation Test In Jiangsu Province(2008-2016)

As an important national examination,National Matriculation Test(NMT)plays a quite significant role in selecting talented persons.With the constant improvement of NMT’s overall system,new examination models have been designed or carried out in relevant subjects.These new models include the transformation of examination’s ways,papers’ contents,questions’ structures and so on.As one of the most important subjects of NMT in our nation,English has always been explored to optimize in recent years in order to play its role of learning evaluation and teaching backwash more effectively.Many provinces and areas in our countries have released plans to reform National Matriculation English Test(NMET)in succession between 2013 and 2014,and these reforms attracted the attention of the whole society.In 2014,the State Council stipulated that the model of two-exam per year could be implemented in the premise of keeping the value of English unchanged.And it also required to strengthen the establishment of systems of evaluating foreign language ability.The project of two-exam per year has been primarily proposed.This project has been determined to carry out in Shanghai,and Zhejiang province.And the first examination of this project has already been held in April,2017 in Shanghai.The project would be carried out in other provinces,such as Jiangsu and so on.The total score of English written examination is 120 in current NMT.And English reading comprehension score accounts for 33.3%.English reading comprehension is divided into two parts---section A and section B.As an important subject at the stage of elementary education,English plays a quite significant role in enhancing students’ language ability and transcultural knowledge.It is a great decision to reform NMET since it would have a profound effect on English teaching in elementary and secondary schools.Therefore,we must ensure to carry out new policies more reliably with careful design.At present,specificreformation of English written examination in NMT has been formulated in Jiangsu provinces.This requires that we should collect opinions from different quarters and make some adjustments according to those reformations in other Province.Validity is a core standard of measuring a test.Thus it is necessary to research the validity of English papers.And it is urgent to study the content validity of English reading comprehension.Based on the characteristics of Bachman and Palmer’s test task frame,this thesis analyzes the content validity of English reading comprehension in NMT from 2008 to2016 according to the nationwide unified examination outline of ordinary institutions’ enrollment(this would be simplified as the Examination Outline)the nationwide unified examination outline’s clarification of ordinary institutions’ enrollment(this would be simplified as the Examination Clarification).The researcher selected English test papers in NMT from 2008 to 2016 in Jiangsu province as the research subjects since the researcher lives and studies in Jiangsu.The thesis analyses the content validity of English reading comprehension in NMT in recent nine years from the following aspects: passage length,test candidates’ reading speed,passage theme,passage style,passage readability and reading sub-skills.The thesis comes to the following conclusion.English reading comprehension basically meet the requirements of the examination outline and examination clarification in Jiangsu in recent years.That is to say,English reading comprehension of recent years has high content validity with various passage genres and extensive themes.The overall difficulty of English reading comprehension is moderate,and English reading comprehension examines test candidates’ reading competence in every respect.However,there are also some shortcomings of English reading comprehension in NMT in Jiangsu.For example,the last passage of each year is too long,and the requirement on test candidates’ reading speed is relatively higher.Passage themes are not distributed unevenly.For instance,themes about history and geography did not appear in the papers in recent years.In addition,the distribution of question numbers was also uneven which aimed at examining the test candidates’ reading sub-skills.For example,questions about passage’s key point ignored to examine test candidates’ competence of understanding the macrostructure of the whole passage and the logic relationship of thecontext.At the end of this thesis,the researcher provides some constructive suggestions for the reform of English in NMT and test candidates’ English learning and teachers’ English teaching.When designing the English reading comprehension tests,designers should make sure that the passage themes and passage genres are diverse.The passages of English reading comprehension should be more close to our daily life so as to reflect the applicability of English learning.As for senior high school’s English teaching,teachers should make materials of English reading comprehension diverse.The themes and genres of those materials selected should be various.Moreover,teachers should pay more attention to reading sub-skills.After the analysis of the thesis,we can find that reading sub-skills mainly examines students’ understanding of specific information in the passage.Thus,teachers should make students exercise more in this aspect.