Chapter 1 Introduction
3
This only choice leads to many problems in our teaching system. It is often the case that
every year the competition for limited higher education resources is so harsh that the
whole senior high school education becomes heavily test-oriented. Teachers of English
language and their candidates are forced to focus on what the College Entrance Test for
English Language (CETEL) emphasizes. They pursue the test score so hard that, for
most of the time, they forget that the ultimate goal of learning a foreign language is to
communicate and thus pay little respect to the principles in acquiring a second language.
So, most commonly in China, candidates know how to take test with English language,
yet they do not know how to communicate in this language. (For candidates’ opinions,
please see 4.1.2.3) How can we convert an embarrassing situation like this? Or, more
precisely speaking, how can CETEL function as an accelerator to promote dynamic
communicative English learning rather than static, dead learning just for the sake of
taking test?
If we are only allowed to seek for the answer within the testing system, then the most
plausible answer lies in to validate CETEL. The reason why it is so suggested is that,
despite the fact of CETEL proclaiming that it has tested communicative language ability,
the real manifestation does not always support this argument. And to validate this test
means to look for evidence from different perspectives and try to form an overview after
a scientific and systematic research. Then the analytical result can answer the question:
does the CETEL test what it proclaims? If it does not satisfactorily achieve doing so,
how can we improve? The whole process of evidence gathering and analysis is called
“validation” and the measure of to what extent a test is validated is called “validity”.
(For detail explanation, please refer to section 3.1)
To validate a test is a complex project, for on one hand the data collection and
procession can be extremely bewildering and, on the other hand, each language sub-skill
(like listening, speaking, reading and writing) has respective characteristics to be
accentuated and in turn the validations need to base upon different theories. With these
considerations, this paper is devoted only to the validation study of listening section of
CETEL. This is firstly because the fundamental place listening ability takes in Second
Language Acquisition (SLA). According to Wong-Fillmore [1] (1991), for a person to
learn a second language, three conditions must be met: