Development of English listening test items based on IRT theory

Abstract

This study has two main purpose. The first one is to improve Listening Test of College English Test- Band Four (CET-4) in China, because the item type of the existing one is simplex and cannot accurately test college students’ English listening ability. The second aim of the study is to make an appropriate profile of undergraduate students’ English listening ability with newly developed English Listening Quality Test (ELQT). Thus, this study employed IRT Rasch Model to check content validity, unidimensionality, item polarity, reliability and separation, item fit, and item bias of ELQT. This measuring method can systematically and comprehensively test the quality of ELQT, which make contribution to innovate the existing CET-4 Listening Test. The sampling strategy of used in this study is stratified sampling, which can insure the representativeness of samples. Listening material is one of the original listening test of CET-4 and the item type of ELQT refers to IELTS. There were 286 students in colleges and universities in Hebei China involved in this study. The result shows that the developed ELQT can well test college students’ English listening ability, which can be a good supplementation of existing CET-4 Listening Test. Improvement should be done in the sampling size aspect. Larger sample size may better show the results.