A Study on the Communicative Validity of the New CET-4 Listening Test

With the development of linguistics, our understandings about language become more and more profound. In the 1990s, Bachman put forward a relatively mature framework of communicative language ability, which consists of competence of knowing the world and competence of knowing the language. With the help of mental capacity, such competence will be properly executed in a communicative context. How to test such communicative language ability has become a big problem for test designers. According to the nature of listening comprehension, this research aims to have an investigation on the validity of the new CET-4 listening subtest from a communicative point of view.