Chapter 1 Introduction
Language testing has a long history. Likewise, language teaching is as old as it in China.Language testing is becoming more and more important in the field of English Education aswell as language teaching. Nowadays, it is widely accepted that testing is very important tolanguage teaching. Both are indispensable to each other. Teaching is directed towardsassessment (Davies 1990: 1). The relationship between them is closely related. Languagetesting can be said to serve as a forerunner of language teaching. First, testing sets goals forteaching. It often provides information to help teachers find out how it encourages andmotivates their learning. Second, testing serves the function of monitoring success inreaching set goals. It offers benefits of measuring whether the teaching is effective or not. Inthe end, it assists in research of language teaching and learning/acquisition. Althoughlanguage testing provides beneficial consequences to language teaching, it cannot beneglected that a great deal of language testing is of very poor quality. Too often it limits intesting accurately what it is supposed to be tested. Because of its intrinsic value, researchershave to endeavor their efforts to work on this field in attempts to perfect language testingtheories.People always classify language learning into four basic skills: listening, speaking,reading and writing. Among them, reading is the most direct and efficient method for most oflanguage learners to acquire knowledge and develop language skills. Only by languagesymbols stimulating, can learners have a strong sense of language. According to Krashen’sinput hypothesis, people acquire a language through understanding comprehensible input(Krashen, 1985). For most language learners, the comprehensive input is efficiently anddirectly obtained through reading as they are put in an embarrassing situation of lackingenough opportunities to practice English with native speakers face to face. Due to that, inChina, reading comprehension becomes a very crucial measurement to test one’s level ofEnglish ability. Meanwhile, the type of reading comprehension is playing a rather key role inmany standardized language proficiency tests home and abroad.
As the form of multiple-choice question (MCQ) is a main type to measure high-schoolstudents’ English ability efficiently, it is now widely used in National Matriculation EnglishTest’ (NMET) reading tests. Accordingly, the researches about the MCQ are being conductedby more and more experts and scholars. MCQ belongs to an objective testing. The reasonswhy most testers are willing to employ it in the testing are mainly concluded as follows. Firstof all, the feature of scoring objectively is universally accepted. Marking process can beconducted by machines automatically. In addition, MCQ provides a way to test variety of linguistic phenomenon such as vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and semantics and so on. Lastbut not least, it covers a great many of English fields and it also can be operated easily.According to those reasons, it is received high recognition from the testers. However, MCQ isalso regarded as a hot potato. In latest years, more and more testing workers and especiallyEnglish teachers point out many disadvantages of it. They argued that this form only can testthe learners’ receptive skills rather than productive skills which are the typical and bestexamples in language practice. In the ，英语论文，英语毕业论文
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