English Language Assessment and the Chinese Learner
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This article is also available for rental through DeepDyve. Email alerts New issue alert. Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic. Related articles in Google Scholar. Citing articles via Google Scholar. The Perspective of Linguistic Laypersons. According to the designers, Level 9 is equivalent to the language competency of a native English speaker.
Is it possible for China's college students to reach Level 9? Theoretically it is, as long as teachers have appropriate teaching methodologies and the students are hard-working. However, if you calculate the time and effort students will have to put in to reach Level 9, it begins to look unrealistic.
The scale is established not just for English majors, but also targets undergraduates and postgraduates not majoring in English. It takes more than 10 years for a non-English major to learn English from elementary school to the second year of. Now they may be under pressure to pass Level 8 and Level 9. The only option is to reduce study time for their professional courses.
However, such speculation should be testified in the future research by comparing strategic processing in testing versus non-testing situations. Third, the initial compilation of the items was discussed among three experts in language testing to evaluate the appropriateness of each item. These were similar to the results obtained among adult test-takers in the reading tests Phakiti, b. Our study extended the strategic processing in the reading skill to other skills, including writing, listening, and speaking. You can login by using one of your existing accounts. The Strategic Processing in Listening Questionnaire had 15 items:
According to a survey conducted several years ago, 46 percent of respondents said that to pass the CET-4, they had to spend half of their study time after class studying English. Moreover, 21 percent said that time spent on English accounted for over half of their total study time in college, even though they were not English majors. English is stealing time from college students' professional courses.
Not just one aspect of English ability is evaluated in the CET-4 and the new nine-level system. A student may reach the minimum requirement in terms of reading, but he or she may still fail overall if they do badly in the listening and speaking parts.
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This exam system requires students to develop all of the skills associated with learning a language. However, different people have different needs for listening, speaking, reading and writing. Students of science and engineering learn English so that they can better search for and read research which presents cutting-edge developments in their respective fields. They may also need to learn to write academic reports in English. Therefore, reading and writing are the most important skills for them. If they are forced to practice listening and interpreting, it will do them little good and even impair their professional studies.
Time and resources are limited for everyone. If English is an inseparable part of one's major and future career, they will voluntarily learn the language. If not, it is a waste of time. Students should learn the required English skills based on the professional needs of their career. The current research adopted a quantitative method using questionnaires, which was decided based on the research setting. As the study was conducted in an international standardized English language test, using qualitative methods, such as think-aloud during the test was not possible.
Using questionnaires has a number of advantages, such as being less intrusive to the participants than using the think-aloud method; and easiness of administering to a large population, which may make the results more generalizable than qualitative studies. Furthermore, answering questionnaires does not require much time and cognitive burden of the participants so that they would not feel tired after long time concentration on completing an important test. However, using questionnaires to elicit strategic processing has also received critiques that the responses to the questionnaires may not necessarily reflect the online processing Han, a.
To minimize this drawback, the shorter the time interval between answering questionnaires and completion of the test, the data are more reliable. Flyers test Flyers test hereafter. The Flyers test is the third of a suite of three Cambridge Young Learners English Tests, which are specially designed for children in primary and lower-secondary school. According to Cambridge English 1 , the difficulty level of the test is level 2 in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.
Consisted of three sections, namely listening, reading and writing, and speaking, the test is paper-based and lasts for approximately 1 h and 15 min. One of the main aims for preparing and taking the Flyers test is to motivate learners, therefore, all the test-takers will receive a Cambridge English certificate to recognize their English learning achievements, hence, the test does not set a cut-off score for pass or fail.
Adding the shields of each section in the test gives a total shields for test-takers. Table 1 summarizes the test format of each section in the Flyers test, including the number of parts and questions, time allowance, and the maximum achievable marks see the sample test and detailed descriptions of the test format of the Flyers test at http: The participants were Chinese young ELLs who sat the Flyers test in a test center in China to voluntarily participate the study.
As no research has been conducted on strategic processing in language testing with young ELLs, the questionnaires were customarily constructed by drawing on the literature and questionnaires of language learning and use strategies in the four skills e. In particular, the construction of the questionnaires adopted conceptualization of strategic processing as a two-component construct with one as cognitive strategic processing and the other being metacognitive strategic processing. The construction of the questionnaires followed the following procedure. First, a comprehensive literature search on language learning and use strategy questionnaires, in particular, language testing strategy questionnaires of the four skills, were gathered.
Second, according to the nature of the sample Flyers tests and considering the age of the participants, items which were relevant to the Flyers test and were appropriate for the young ELLs were selected. As the majority of the existing questionnaires target on the adult ELLs or adult test-takers, the language of the selected items was modified so that it was comprehensible to young children.
Third, the initial compilation of the items was discussed among three experts in language testing to evaluate the appropriateness of each item. After three rounds of discussions, the items which were unrelated to the Flyers tests or were inappropriate for children were deleted.
The draft Chinese questionnaires were double checked by another NATTI certified English and Chinese translator and then sent to a young Chinese ELL, who had similar age and English learning background as the participants, to check the comprehensibility of the items. The final version of the Chinese questionnaires was used for the data collection. The items were written in simple past tense and the participants were asked to respond to the questionnaires by recalling the strategic processing in completing corresponding sections of the Flyers test.
The Strategic Processing in Listening Questionnaire had 15 items: For the Strategic Processing in Speaking Questionnaire, there were 15 items: Before the data collection, the participants and their accompanying parents were informed about the voluntary nature of the study. They were asked to sign a written consent form and only those returned a signed consent were included in the data collection.
The data collection was undertaken in a Flyers test immediately after the test-takers completed the test. The questionnaires of strategic processing of listening, and reading and writing were distributed and collected in groups upon completion of the two sections. The data collection was organized and supervised by the staff working in the Cambridge test center. To minimize potential problems arising from students with reading difficulties, the staff read each item in Chinese for the participants.
Both descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were performed. In order to answer RQ1 — the nature of strategic processing in listening, reading and writing, and speaking, confirmatory factory analyses CFAs were performed because the design of the questionnaires was adapted from well-established questionnaires with pre-specified structures. Besides these fit statistics, the factor loadings of items in corresponding scales were also checked to make sure that they were greater than 0. The CFAs were performed in Mplus version 7. Once the constructs were validated using the CFAs, the M scores of the sub-categories of the constructs were calculated and used in the subsequent analyses.
For RQ2, Pearson correlation analyses were employed. For the structure of strategic processing in listening, items 5 and 6 were deleted due to their low item-total correlations. All the factor loadings of items were above 0. In terms of the nature of strategic processing in reading and writing, item 2 was removed due to its low item-total correlation.
With regard to the construct of strategic processing in speaking, item 3 was eliminated due to its low item-total correlation. The retained items, their factor loadings on the respective scales, and the scale reliability are summarized in Table 3. Table 4 presents descriptive statistics of the scales, including min. Consistently in the three sections of the Flyers test, our young ELLs exhibited dual-components structure of strategic processing, which was similar to that of the adult test-takers.
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Descriptive statistics of the scales of the Strategic Processing Questionnaires. The results of correlation analyses are presented in Table 5 , which shows that within each section of the test, cognitive and metacognitive processing are consistently and positively associated, and the strength of the correlation coefficients are moderate listening: Across the three sections of the test, the correlations of cognitive strategic processing in one skill also positively and moderately related to that in the other skills r s range between 0.
Somewhat out of expectation that even though strategic processing in speaking did not have significant correlations with the speaking shields, they positively and weakly correlated with the shields in reading cognitive: The variance of the total shields explained by the cognitive and metacognitive strategic processing in different sections of the test varied: The results of the mixed MANOVAs for listening, reading and writing, and speaking are presented in Table 6 and are visually displayed in Figures 1 — 3.
Post hoc analyses demonstrated that all the pairwise comparisons between the three levels of test-takers in both cognitive and metacognitive strategy use were significant: All the pairwise comparison of metacognitive strategic processing in speaking was significantly different among the three groups of ELLs: Because of the significant interaction effect, the differences between cognitive and metacognitive strategic processing in the three groups were also explored using three separate paired t -tests.
In summary, consistently across the three sections of the Flyers test, it was observed that our young Chinese test-takers were engaged more often in metacognitive strategic processing than cognitive strategic processing.
English Language Assessment and the Chinese Learner
However, low-performing students did not show any difference in using cognitive and metacognitive strategies in the speaking test. In addition, high-performing ELLs also reported using more cognitive and metacognitive strategies than their low-performing counterparts in the three sections of the test. Across the three sections of the Flyers test, the results revealed that two latent factors of strategic processing: This seems to indicate that our child ELLs were aware of and were able to reflect upon the strategies they had employed in the test. The two-dimensionality of the strategic processing construct in listening, reading and writing, as well as speaking among the child ELLs resembled the nature of the strategic processing among the adult ELLs e.
However, there has been inconsistency with regard to whether the cognitive and metacognitive strategic processing factors are constituted by multiple sub-categories respectively e. For instance, Phakiti a reported that the cognitive processing factor comprised of comprehending, memorizing, and retrieving sub-factors, and the metacognitive strategic processing consisted of planning, monitoring, and evaluating.
But these sub-factors was not be able to replicated in Phakiti a , b in which there were only a cognitive and metacognitive factor without identification of sub-factors. These seem to indicate that we cannot assume the nature of the strategic processing revealed from our sample to be representative of the nature of strategic processing among other child ELLs population. In order to further validate the structure of the strategic processing in different language use skills in language tests, more studies are needed with more diverse populations. One of the reasons why the study did not purposefully make fine-tuned sub-categories for cognitive and metacognitive strategic processing in our questionnaires was related to the young age of the participants and the contents of the test items in the Flyers.
Because our participants were children, they might not understand the ideas, such as retrieving and evaluating. Moreover, in order to reveal fine-tuned categories, more items on different sub-categories of cognitive and metacognitive processing would have to be added into the questionnaires. Potentially, this would lead to fatigue of the participants, who only have short period of concentration a their age.
The reality was that our young test-takers had to spend almost one and a half hours to complete listening, reading, and writing parts of the test before responding to the questionnaires.
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If they had faced a large number of questionnaire items, they might not have answered the questionnaires completely, or even worse, they might not have agreed to participate the study voluntarily. When they had responded the questionnaires under the condition of being not mentally concentrated, they might not have understood the statements in the questionnaires properly after the intense language test, and hence, the responses would have not been reliable. Another reason for us not including a wider range of items on strategic processing was related to the contents of the tests.
The selection of the items was carefully carried out according to the sample test items available online. As a result, some items pertaining to the complexity of strategic processing in the questionnaires for adult test-takers were not appropriate for our participants. Our results that moderate and positive correlations r s between 0. Furthermore, our results that both cognitive and metacognitive strategic processing in one section of the Flyers test are positively and moderately related to that in the other two sections seems to suggest that the test-takers who are able to operate strategic processing in listening, also tend to be strategic in handling reading, writing, and speaking tasks.
In fact, within a language skill, we only observed that metacognitive strategic processing and reading and writing shields had significant relationship. Such result might be largely attributable to the written mode of the reading and writing section, which might enable the test-takers to implement metacognitive strategies more successfully compared to in the listening and speaking sections. The audio and oral modes of the listening and speaking might not give test-takers sufficient time for metacognitive strategies to be carried out successfully. This finding seems to align with the Compensatory Encoding Model CEM Walczyk, , even though the construction of the CEM aims at explaining how readers use metacognitive strategies to compensate for inefficient processing in reading in order to achieve good level of comprehension.
Nonetheless, it postulates for metacognitive strategies to operate successfully as a compensatory mechanism for processing inefficiency, sufficient time is necessary Walczyk et al. This speculation could be further evident in our results in the speaking section, where no difference was found between the cognitive and metacognitive strategies only among the low-achieving students, who presumably took longer time to convert their conceptual ideas into English, possibly impeding their execution of metacognitive strategies.
On the other hand, the moderate- and high-achieving students might have achieved a level of processing which allowed them to use metacognitive strategies in the online information processing during the spoken mode, and they indeed adopted more metacognitive strategies than cognitive strategies in speaking.