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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Background
Since the advent of communicative language testing in the 1970s, a lot of scholars(Marrow, 1991; Wood, 1993; Bachman, 1990; Bachman & Palmer, 1996) put forwardthe notion of authenticity in assessment. Marrow (1991:112 ) pointed to ‘the overridingimportance of authenticity’ in his dicussion of communicative language test. Wood(1993: 233) proposed that there are two major issues in language testing —validity andreliability , and they ‘coalesce into one even greater issue: authenticity vs.inauthenticity . For Wood authenticity is one of the most important issues in languagetesting. To use Conrad’s phrase, authenticity is at ‘the heart of the matter’ of languagetesting (Bachman, 1990:330). Bachman & Palmer (1996) see authenticity as ‘a criticalquality of language tests.The importance of authenticity of language testing can be described as thefollowing aspects: first, authentic test can predict the test takers’ ability of languageapplication in target language use domain. Second, authentic test is important tostimulate test takers’ enthusiasm and better elicit their ability. Third, authentic test cangenerate positive backwash and urge the test takers to use authentic materials so as toimprove their communicative language ability (Li Qinghua, 2001).As a kind of communicative language testing (Douglas, 2000:9), ESP testing alsoshares the characteristic of authenticity. According to Douglas, authenticity is thereflection of validity of ESP testing, thus it is more demanding of authenticity.
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1.2 Significance of the study
First, this study is meaningful in its theoretical contribution. Being one of thedetermining factors that constitute the usefulness of a test (Bachman and Palmer, 1996)and the reflection of validity of ESP test (Douglas,2000), authenticity should be one ofthe most important considerations in ESP test design. Generally speaking there are twoapproaches to defining authenticity: the real life approach and the interactional approach(Bachman, 1990). The debate that which kind of authenticity should be adopted in ESPassessment has lasted for a long time. In this research the literature is reviewed and theabove question is discussed. And It is expected that this study may shed some new lighton understanding the concept of authenticity．Furthermore, this research aims to make contribution to the development of legalEnglish test which reflects the pragmatic significance. As the demand of English invarious areas, a lot of tests have been developed in different countries in recent decades.To exam the English ability of legal workers, Legal English Certificate Tests have beenset in many countries, for example, ILEC in Britain, and LEC in China. These tests aredifferent in many aspects, such as the skills, the materials, and the type of test task, etc.So far few attempts have been made to explore the authenticity of these tests. Thepurpose of the study is to establish a new checklist to compare the authenticity of thetest materials and test tasks of the two tests, and make discussion about authenticity thatshould be adopted in different sub-tests, finding out the space that should be improved,which can provide some implications on ESP test design.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 ESP and ESP testing
Since the emerging of ESP, so many scholars (Hallida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。