A Study on Content Validity of Reading Comprehension in TEM-8 (2016-2021)

Abstract

: TEM-8 is an authoritative test to judge the professional level of English majors, in which reading comprehension occupies an important proportion. Based on Bachman & Palmer’s test task characteristics framework and combined with the requirements of teaching syllabus for English majors and the revised TEM-8 test syllabus in 2015, this paper, from the perspectives of language input characteristics and expected response characteristics, takes TEM-8 reading comprehension passages in the past five years as the research object to analyze the content validity of reading comprehension with the methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis. The results reveal that TEM-8 reading comprehension test in 2016-2021 has relatively high content validity on the whole, but there is space for further improvement in the length of reading text, the selection of text materials, the balance of text difficulty and the diversity of response types.