1. Introduction
1.1 Research background
The world is becoming relatively smaller to modem people, and the cooperationamong nations is becoming more frequent with cutting edge technologies replacing oldones. As we all know China is playing an increasingly more significant role in theworld. Thus communication in all fields is possible between China and other countries.English as tiie major communication medium among international communications isbecoming essential and crucial all through China. At the same time, we can't ignore thefact that most Chinese college students have been learning "dumb English" and "deafEnglish" due to all kinds of educational limitations. Since the major function of alanguage is communication, and 70 percent is communicated verbally，we can't let thecurrent situation continue, and let English education serve what's needed most.Though Chinese college students may have mastered a large vocabulary and beadept at reading，they probably feel grueling when talking to native English speakers.The question，then, leads to increasing students' performance in oral skills. How do weknow what level of oral English they are at? Give them a test.English testing took place as soon as English teaching started. But the history of oralEnglish testing isn't as long. Because it's tough to be totally objective and reliable，oralEnglish testing was not started until 1940’s. Oral English wasn't valued, as it should havebeen. Although Oral English testing has made its way in some areas in China in the pastyears, it's still limited to people going abroad for further studies or immigration and avery limited number of college students. The majority of students don't have a chance toknow where they stand at the test as they deserve.
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1.2 Research purpose and significance
The professional collegial context where this research was carried out is mostspecial. Guangdong Peizheng College has been putting lots of effort and fund innurturing students' English competence. The school board believes it's for the students'best to learn authentic English, Urns about 60 foreign teachers are hired each year fromnative English speaking countries. In order for the students to improve their English level，the college set up an organization called the English Education Cente/XEEC for short)，allfreshmen except English majors and arts majors, will be studying in the EEC for one fullyear, with 8 periods of lessons (intensive reading and listening) given by ChineseEnglish teachers，and 4 periods of oral English lessons given by English speaking experts.Due to the fact that a number of Chinese English teacher have visited the university ofAlberta for a year and have had access to lessons on the CLB, and most of them acceptthe idea, so they recommended that the oral English lessons be taught under thecurriculum developed under the CLB. The mission of the EEC is to help students to useEnglish skillfully, especially in oral English and listening. In order to facilitate the use ofactive and cooperative learning techniques，the college administration makes a concertedeffort to teach in small classes(l5-20students).
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2. Literature Review
2.1 An overview of oral English test
Testing, in social life，is a worldwide feature. People have been tested for differentpurposes in different fields to prove their competence level or to gain credentials. Testshave become an essential means not only in sports，medial purposes, but also crackingcriminal cases，etc. It has gone far beyond the most restricted use of testing in theeducational field. Tests to see how a person performs especially in relation to a thresholdof performance have become social norms and Mfill a gate keeping function in that theycontrol entry to many important social roles.It is a general belief that teaching itself is as much an art as it is a science. Noscience could be called science without measurement, as we are all aware. Testing inlanguage is only one form of measurement. By their definitions，teaching and testingcould be closely linked, interacted and influenced with and by each other.Alderson, J.C. & D. Wall. (1993，in Alderson et al 1996:281) propose WashbackHypothesis before anybody and go on to postulate a series of other plausible alternativehypotheses within the context of EFL. The intention of the Hypothesis is to clarify theissues that washback studies must address.
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2.2 An overview of washback
It's generally believed that tests affect teaching and learning, as stated by Aldersonand Wall (1993) that "tests are held to be powerful determiners of what happens inclassroom". The phenomenon that exams influence teaching and learning is known as"washback" or "backwash". Although this is relatively a new topic in language education，washback has long been discussed in general education (Wall 2000:500). This definitionwas later used in applied linguistics to refer to the particular influences that languagetesting, especially foreign language testing has on correspondent teaching and learning(Huang et al 2002:288). The term ‘washback，has several versions of definition inresearchers' studies for particular purposes: “a concept prominent in applied linguistics,referring to the extent to which the introduction and use of a test influences languageteachers and learners to do things they would not otherwise do tiiat promote or inhibitlanguage learning” (Messick 1996:241); Washback unquestionably unites testing andteaching and learning no matter what it means in detail.
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3. Methodology.......20
3.1 Research goals .......20
3.2 Subjects....... 20
3.3 Instruments....... 22
3.3.1 Oral English tests scaled by the CLB ....... 22
3.3.2 Questionnaires .......25
3.3.3 A checklist of classroom observation .......25
3.3.4 Interview .......26
4. Data Analysis and Discussion ....... 27
4.1 Questionnaires .......27
4.1.1 Questionnaire for students....... 27
4.1.2 Post-test questionnaire for foreign teachers....... 39
4.2 A list of class observations....... 46
4.3 Interviews....... 47
5. Conclusion....... 49
5.1 Main findings .......49
5.2 Implications .......50
5.3 Limitations of the study....... 51
4. Data Analysis and Discussion
4.1 Questionnaires
This question tries to probe into the deeper motivation why the students want tograsp good oral English, and it helps the students realize learning oral English isn't justtheir job，not just to finish what they are supposed to do，but following an internationaltrend and fact that can't be changed. From the answer we can tell that most students haverealized that English is dominating the international communication^ which is a goodthing-This questions is trying to get the information of students putting what they haveleamt in practice, that is, apart from the classroom，is there any chance they would speakEnglish at another time and another location. The statistics show that a quarter ofstudents have a fair chance to do that, only about 10 percent have a chance or put outtheir effort to use English regularly. It's disappointing to see that about 66 percent ofstudents have little or no chance to use their English, which makes it hard to be fluent inEnglish and hard to be skillful in English communication skills.
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Conclusion
In the research of assessing college students' oral English with CLB through themeans of oral English tests, questionnaires, class observations and interviews atGuangdong Peizheng College，the following positive washback of the CLB have beenfound. First，about half of the students involved are willing to use English out of theclassroom，and tiiey have realized they themselves are the key to master good oralEnglish, a majority of them feel the inner motivation to grasp fluent English.Second，CET-4 SET is the only nation wide oral English test organized by tiieChinese government, which is a high-stake exam. But not every student gets a chance totest their level of oral English proficiency. What's more，the standard of the SET is notpublic，which means there is a great potential for the Benchmarks like the CLB. Most ofthe students would love to see that oral English become part of CET-4. After all，thewashback on teaching and learning is so intense, no students would want to go against acompulsory test.Third, the CLB has opened a lot of students' eyes to the international oral Englishtests and encouraged lots of them to try their best to learn oral English, and mostimportant of all，they increased students' confidence with some international oral Englishtest，like TOEFL and lELTS,
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Reference (omitted)
