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d up till nowa lot of research into the validity or the reliability or other aspects of the two tests havebeen done separately. However, researchers as well as language teachers and testdevelopers tend to ignore the common points the two tests share(they are taken mainlyby college students, the purposes are chiefly for the assessment of English proficiency,they are both arranged on a large scale and both of them are composed of at least threesubtests ― listening, reading and writing.) , which accounts for the absence of researchabout the comparison of the two tests. As is known, lELTS is universally recognized as ahighly reliable system for assessing the language proficiency of candidates who want tostudy or work where English is the language of communication while NETEM is , tosome degree, a debatable test in terms of its validity. Many people including mostlanguage teachers wonder whether it can really test the language ability of the candidateswho intend to further their postgraduate study, especially the reading comprehension part.Can all the multiple choice questions really reflect the real language level of students?Can we exclude the possibility that some students make the right choices only byguessing? There are too much uncertainties in the answers of candidates, which havecaused some trouble in the evaluation and selection of prospective postgraduates.Therefore, from the very beginning, NETEM has undergone several reforms. However,the reading comprehension part remains more or less the same in terms of questionformats(only multiple choice questions) and reading topics(mainly about economics,politics, science).

2. Literature Review

2.1 Historical Development of Language Testing
Generally speaking, language testing has gone through three periods: pre-scientificperiod, psychometric-structuralist period and integrative -sociolinguistic period.Pre-scientific Period (—the end of 1940s)In this period, language testing has the following principle characteristics: languagetesting is only part of language teaching; there is no distinction between tests andexercises; the testing method is mainly translation; the scoring of the tests is subjective;the main use of tests is to measure achievement and tests are usually administered withinclasses. Because of the above features in this period, it correspondently has manydisadvantages. For example, it is difficult to evaluate the tests; scoring the paper istime-consuming; the results can not be analyzed scientifically and can not reflect thestudents' language level, also, listening and speaking skills cannot be tested.Psychometric-Structuralist Period (the 1950s and the 1960s)This period begins from the early 1950s and ends with the late of 1960s. In thisperiod, language testing becomes a subject and a lot of language testing institutions comeinto being. Compared with those of pre-scientific period, the uses, the scale and the scopeof the tests are widened and scoring the tests tends to be more objective. Besides,multiple choice items are used during this stage. Another significant point of tests in thisstage is that the tests measure language instead of grammatical knowledge and the resultsare said to reflect the students' level.Integrative-Sociolinguistic Period (the early 1970s ― present)People hold different views about the time from the early 1970s till now. somescholars regard this time as a whole, a single complete stage in the course of l本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。