 Hello, everyone. Actually, it's my pleasure to be here to share with you this topic. I asked Bruce, he said your association was set up five months ago. And when Linda told me this is the first feature talk, I kind of very nervous, you know, because this is my first time to give a talk in Hong Kong. Yes, I give a lot of talks in Mandarin China, it's in Chinese. It's much, much easier for me. But it's great honor, I like to come here to share the talk. The topic is 40 years of the national matriculation angry test in China about its impact and implications. I'm from Chongqing University, it's located in southwest China. I also work as a consultant to Cambridge Assessment English, so every year I will spend two or three months there. Just now I mentioned, because it's my first time to give a talk in Hong Kong, so I had many rounds of communication with Linda about what should I talk about. And this is one of the emails Linda sent to me and said, oh, people might be interested in this and that. And she raised a few questions for me to consider with her help. I came up with two topics, a few topics I should say, right? And then in the end we decided these two topics. I already gave the talk this morning about the first one, China's Standards of English Language Ability. We called it CSE for short. The next topic is 40 years of the national matriculation angry test, because this year it's the 40th year since the restoration of the test. And CSE is quite a new national policy. It was released just this year. Its English version was released two weeks ago. As a warm-up activity, I would like you to look at this old photo and guess when it was taken and why. Welcome. And guess why it was taken and what did you see from this old photo? Could you see? Do you see anybody familiar? That's me. That's me. Yes? Yes, that's a village school. That's where I studied, started my education. And this photo was taken 40 years ago, 1977. The year when Gaokao was restored. Because of that, my father was excited. He saw the hope for their, with my mom. They saw the hope of us children. So my father gave us all five kids together to take this photo. This is a photo, the first photo in my life. And the first photo with my siblings 40 years ago. I was 10 years old at that time. I wish you could see more of the context then, cultural, social, educational, even political. If you look very carefully you could see the cracks in the hole. It's dangerous building. That's the only school building in my village school. And you could see some other kids that were so curious, right? Because they didn't see camera in their lifetime, first time. And you might also notice, sorry, no smiles on our faces. See, just one shot, you could see quite a lot of the economy, of the education of people's life. I can just use one word to describe the life then, poverty stricken. See, my young's brother, he was wearing a coat, but I was wearing slippers. And you could see my brother's toes. See, brother's toes there. It's very hard for me to imagine life then, now. That's how we started 40 years ago. And also you saw the color, you see the color, black, gray. That's the color then. So with these backgrounds, context, let's start the 40 years journey. In my talk, there will be some key acronyms or terms. Gao Kao, in Chinese, Gao Deng Ru Xue Kao Shi. That's college, university entrance examinations. And Gao Kao English, that's English as one of the subjects in college entrance examinations. Because before it got the official name, we called it Gao Kao English, and then we got its official name first, matriculation English test, M-E-T. Finally, the official name is national matriculation English test. So in my talk, I will use those terms. And this diagram shows the change in and reforms of the M-E-T over the 40 years. In my talk, there will be two threads. One is about the M-E-T, the reforms change. The other one is about my personal journey as a Gao Kao test taker, a test developer, researcher, and a parent of M-E-T test taker. So two threads. This diagram shows the major events or major reforms. Gao Kao was restored in 1977. And in 1983, its weighting increased to 100 as a compulsory subject in Gao Kao. That was the year I first took Gao Kao. And then in 1989, Gao Kao English got its official name M-E-T. It was standardized. It's the first time we had a test specification, and its first time guided writing was introduced into Gao Kao English. In 1991, its official name changed to National Matriculation English Test. And then in 2000, a listening comprehension was introduced, first introduced to M-E-T. And in 2005, the first time I was invited to help design the M-E-T in Chongqing. That's when I started to do research in M-E-T. Then in 2009, the vocabulary size for the M-E-T was increased from 1500 to 3000. That's the year my son took his Gao Kao. And then in 2016, the Ministry of Education introduced this reform twice a year of Gao Kao. And also one task type read-to-write was introduced into Gao Kao English. This is a very brief introduction. Now let's have a look at the test structure of 1978 Gao Kao English. Could you see what were assessed? What was assessed? What was assessed then? Yeah, grammar translation. Because then grammar translation, that's the teaching approach, right? And only two skills, translation and reading were assessed. And mainly at sentence level. You could see sentence completion, sentence transfer, Chinese English sentence translation. So basically at word and sentence level then. And in 1978, only one reading passage. Perhaps you couldn't see it quite clearly, but you could see such a short reading passage. 218 words with five MC multiple choice items. Accounted for 20% out of 100. Could you imagine the stakes for any one test taker getting any one item wrong? For one item, five marks. In China, Gao Kao is then was very competitive. So you can imagine that. And these are the four multiple choice items. Each item five marks. So you could see then test design was not professional at all. In 1978, I took my first high stakes test. We call it Xiao Sen Chu. That's the entrance examinations for junior secondary school. Two subjects for us, Chinese and mathematics. No English. I had not even heard of English then. That's me. And then in 1981, I took my second high stakes exam. The entrance examinations for senior secondary school. For this whole class, only four girls succeeded in entering senior secondary school. These four girls. Obviously that's me. Always the shortest one. These four girls succeeded in senior secondary school. At that time, we had no idea about bias. No test fairies. Among those four girls, one girl didn't go to the senior secondary school because her mom died. And her father wanted her to get married early. And another girl, she dropped out after just half a year of schooling in senior secondary school because her parents wanted to build a house for her brother to get married. They couldn't afford her education, so she dropped. Just this girl and me carried on with our senior secondary school education. And this diagram shows the increasing waiting of NMET in the first few years of Gaoka restoration from 1997-0 to 100% in 1983. That's a year, 1983. That's a year I first took Gaokao. In my two-year senior secondary school study, my first English teacher is a teacher of Russian. He studied Russian at university. Then he taught himself English and became our English teacher. He's a very good man. He's a very good man. But he's a victim of the 10-year turmoil. He got mental problems. I thought I learned a lesson in the first year with my English. The second year, we had a new teacher who studied English for three years from a teacher's school. The students entered the teacher's school after a three-year junior secondary school study. He studied English for three years and came to my school to be an English teacher. I remembered when he read the line T40s. He looked at the number, line T40s with S. He didn't know how to pronounce that, how to say that, how to say that. But he started to teach us A, B, and C. So I started my English learning journey from the second year of my senior high school, senior secondary school. After one year's study, we graduated. At that time, not everyone got the chance to take Gaokao. We need to set the pre-examinations to compete for the rare opportunity to take Gaokao. I remember when I was setting the pre-examination Gaokao English, the test paper was so difficult. I couldn't do most of the items, but I saw the boy next to me. He was writing all the time. I couldn't help tears just flooding out of my eyes. I thought I must fail. But in the end, it turned out I succeeded Heffield. You know why? Can you figure out why? Because he didn't know the answer either. What he was writing was all Chinese pin-in. So he did much worse than I did, and I succeeded. So I got the opportunity to take my first Gaokao. Of course, I failed. I had forgotten the scores of all the other subjects in my first Gaokao, apart from English. I remembered my score of Gaokao English first time, 46 out of 100. To you, it's so no. To me, it's a huge achievement. At that time, I was 16. I was young. I was innocent. I thought, hmm, I had studied English for one year. I got 46. If I went to study for another year, what might be the score? At that time, I didn't say 92. I said 86. So I went to a Gaokao test preparation school for one more year. Very luckily, in that one year, we had a very qualified English teacher. He taught us one year in that test preparation school, used textbooks. He compiled himself. And I also got the chance to take my second Gaokao. I got exactly what I anticipated a year ago, a year before. 86 out of 100 in that one year. So you could say, teacher's quality, how important it was for kids. And that's the second year. So let's look at my first year Gaokao English, this structure. Could you see back there? See, what was there? Word pronunciation, recollection, error correction, word spinning, word matching paraphrase, sentence transfer. So you could say most of the items were at word level, sentence level, right? And reading is down there. These are some examples of the items. That's when I took my second Gaokao. So after my second Gaokao, because I applied to study English as a major at university, so I had to take the speaking test. I remember I was asked a couple of questions, a lot of them I understood, except the last one. I couldn't remember what's the question now, but I definitely remember my answer then, because it was so simple. I said, I don't think I can. I don't think I can. And to my big surprise, the examiner said, very good. You know why he praised me? Because many other candidates said, I think I can't. I think I can't. That's English. I don't think I can. That's English. Because of this one answer, I was admitted to a teacher's college to study English. So you could say, at that time, the English education then, and how much we need qualified teachers. This table compares the two years of Gaokao, the two years I took my Gaokao. If you look at the task types, item numbers, and the waiting, you could say, what could you see? See the task types? Item number, item number, and waiting. Even, you see, two years next to each other, you could see a lot of inconsistencies. For example, look at this one, sentence transfer, sentence completion, that's different. And the item number is so different. And the waiting is also different. They changed quite a lot, year by year. And we teachers and test-takers didn't know what would be in the next Gaokao English. So inconsistency was a serious issue then. And then I was admitted to this Tsigong Teacher's College. Tsigong Teacher's College, that's me. I was once young, very young. When I was studying in that teacher's college, we didn't have even one professor. We didn't have access to authentic materials. I didn't even have a tape recorder or a radio to listen to English. I studied very hard, mainly by reading simplified levels and textbooks. I was trained to be a school teacher. But three years later, I got the opportunity to take another high-stakes test. If I had succeeded, I could become a university teacher. But I was told by a Sadie, she said, because that test was to select university teachers. So height would be one of the criteria. And obviously I couldn't change that. But I did to Chitin on the day when they measure my height. I did a sense like this. And the doctor said, she measured me. Then I ran away. So she couldn't get me back to measure me again. But when I entered, when I succeeded in entering Sichuan University of International Studies, I found that's a lot of the case. Anyway, that's just one thing. Then you could see the transparency. We didn't have that transparency then. I was admitted. I passed that high-stakes exam, written and speaking exams, and entered this Sichuan University of International Studies for my bachelor's degree. When we succeeded in that exam, we were assigned to different colleges and universities. So I was assigned back to the teacher's college as an assistant teacher. And in my lifetime, the first time we had a native speaker of English to teach us speaking and writing. On my graduation, I mean, after I got my bachelor's degree, I was assigned first to a remote middle school to teach English. In that middle school, before I went there, no key succeeded in entering any college or university, mainly because of the poor quality of English teachers. So I was there teaching one year. And one year later, the headmaster in that school came to my college to give me 12,000 RMB. Then at that time for me, one month, my monthly income is 88 RMB. So it's like all of a sudden I become rich for a short while. Because the class I taught, many kids from that class succeeded in entering teacher's school, you know, three years college, or even four years college universities. Now many of those students become civil servants, city mayors, professors even. I'm very proud of my first year teaching experience then. That's from 1988 to 1989. But at that time, as a high senior secondary school teacher, I didn't know the reforms of those aspects in the Gaokao English. In 1989, Gaokao English got its official name, matriculation English test. And the first time we had test specifications. And Gaokao English was standardized. We used many multiple choice questions to assess students, test takers language use. And the guided writing was first introduced into Gaokao English. This table shows the test structure of 1989 MET. You could say part one English knowledge, part two English knowledge usage. We had some new task types like closed test, reading comprehension and guided writing. Many of those task types are retained up to today. So since then it's standardized. And at the first time, reading accounted for 40% out of 100. This shows the first time guided writing was introduced into Gaokao English. You could say, if you couldn't read Chinese, but you could figure out these are the directions. So the directions were much in detail. Here it says write the announcement in English in 70 to 100 words. Please don't translate the direction from Chinese into English directly. So you could say at the beginning for this guided writing, the test takes were told in detail what to do. And then in 1991, the official name, National Metropolitan English Test and the total score for Gaokao English MET increased from 100 marks to 150. And another task type AC revision was introduced. In 1991, that's a year my son was born. And after I had taught in that teacher's college for four years, I left my son behind to my parents. I moved on to study for my master's degree at Sutan University. A year later, my husband joined me for his master's degree. And we had struggled quite a lot for our study. And then I was employed by Tonkin University as an assistant teacher in 1996. That's when we first moved to Tonkin. That's the first time I attended an international conference. It's in Peking University, a language teacher in 1997. That's the first time I attended an international conference. And because I worked very hard and also did a study to do research, in three years' time I was promoted to be an associate professor. During that time in 2000, in the year 2000, listening comprehension was first introduced into the MET. So you could say it's very late we added this listening comprehension until 2012, very recent. During those years, there's some instability, instability of this task type in Galco English. That's why this morning, remember, this morning when we talked about those teachers they assessed themselves, they found listening is their weakest skill, right? That's a passionate reason. And this shows the directions of listening comprehension in 2003. The total score, 30 marks out of 150. The test takers had two minutes to transfer their answer to the answer sheet from the test paper. Two sections altogether for the listening comprehension. Part one, five short dialogues. Read once. Part two, five longer dialogues, or monologues. And read twice, I read twice. I had worked in Chongqing University for five years. Then I moved on to once again, left my son behind to my parents. This time I went to Shanghai Jiao Tong University to study for my PhD. That's my PhD. And when I left, my son's a little boy, when I graduated, he became a young man. So you could see the huge change in four years time. That's me in Shanghai, first time to attend a conference on language assessment. And my PhD was later published. I was involved in NMAJ Chongqing test paper development for three years. This table shows the test structure of NMAJ Chongqing. The policy started in 2004. The Ministry of Education had this policy. The provinces, cities could design their own NMAJ test papers. So Chongqing was one of the, I think, the most 19 provinces to develop their own test papers. So these table shows, those three years, they test components, and task types, item numbers, and the weighting of NMAJ Chongqing. When I was first involved in developing NMAJ Chongqing, I realized how much research we needed in this field. So since 2006, my team and I have been carrying conducting research in Gaokao English. And we published a book called entitled, A Synchronic and Diachronic Study of the NMAJ test papers. And we also had a project funded by the National Foundation of Philosophy and Social Science. And I would like you to do one more activity. Could you say back there this statement? This is a senior school graduate Hong Kong youth statement. Could you please take a minute to look at the statement and assess this student language proficiency and guess what might be the score for his Gaokao English out of 150. You can compare with your students from mainland China, right? If you know their performance and also their Gaokao school in English. Okay, please. High 120s, low 130s. You mean? For that student got that score in his Gaokao. Out of 150? Yes. What might be their score? 129, 130, 132. Okay. That range there. Yes. Any other guess? Very exact. So you could say we can make their assessment. This statement was written by my son. At that time, right after his Gaokao, because at that time he's targeting Tsinghua Peking University, then after his AMET I said, what if you couldn't get into Tsinghua or Peking University? The other choice is to study Hong Kong. So he wrote this statement after his AMET. And he got in his Gaokao English 136. So exactly 136. But he got, the total score is very high. His total score was very high. Ranked 15, I think it's 15, among 180,000 students in Chongqing in 2009. And he went to Tsinghua University to study architecture. And this picture was at their commencement. I was selected as the representative of parent. On behalf of 1,000, on behalf of the parents of 1,000 graduates to give a speech at their commencement to thank the school and the teachers. And also to congratulate the kids. And this picture shows the first day of my son's Gaokao. Parents were waiting outside the school for the kids to come out after the first subject exam. Okay, let's see. Let's review the 40 years of the AMET. 1978, 1988, 2018. You could say first, the skills were assessed. In 1978, translation reading. In 1998, reading, writing. And in 2018, listening, reading, knowledge, use, and writing. And all through these years, one skill was not assessed, speaking. So now you know why. Students from Mainland China, they cannot speak. Of course, maybe some. I mean, on Mainland China, there are huge gaps between areas. Even in one city like mine, Chongqing, you could see huge gaps between schools. But as a whole, students in Mainland China, they are not that good at speaking. One of the reasons, because speaking is not assessed. For those students who apply to study languages, they will take speaking tests. As after the AMET, written AMET. And in some provinces and cities like Guangdong, Guangdong province, they have speaking and listening tests together. See, computer-based. So it's different from province to province. But for the national test paper, no speaking is included. Do you still remember my four siblings? Do you still remember my father? He saw the hope for us five children. These are five of us with my parents. You could see the huge changes. Four of us five children took Gaokao and changed our lives. For my brother, eldest brother, twice Gaokao. For me twice Gaokao. My sister three times Gaokao. And there's one story even. You could see how huge the impact could be for children, for students. My eldest brother, he was studying in university when I graduated the first time I took Gaokao. I remember the night before the Gaokao, he gave me a white, you know, a white medicine tablet. And he said, you take that, then you can fall asleep right away, right away. And the next year, he did the same thing to me and to my sister. After my sister passed her Gaokao, he told us, it's vitamin C. People tried every means to help you to get prepared for the exam. And luckily three of my brothers, my three brothers, sorry, my three brothers, now they are entrepreneurs, they are entrepreneurs. And my sister, civil servant, a government official, and I'm the only one doing academic, become a professor. And you could see the, what's a huge difference. Do you see from these two pictures? They are, you know, my siblings and my children. They all smile. See? They're all, yeah, they're all smiling. And also you see, very colorful with their clothes, right? That picture was taken 10 years ago. It's almost at our same age. So you could see the huge difference between the two generations. Because just because of, I think, many education helped us to have a huge, different life. Not just for my generation, but for our next generation and maybe generations to come. And this is my big family getting together last spring festival. One year ago. Okay. To prepare this talk, I did many test papers, Gaoka test papers again. Not just to see my English performance. Unfortunately, I found I didn't make much progress over the years in my Gaoka performance. But what really worries me, what really worries about me. Could you please see my performance here? I did those test papers in one week's time. Okay. I did it just once. I didn't spend much time to think and, you know, just carry on doing. Okay. All those main objective items. Not subjective. No listening because I didn't have the tape. I mean, for the listening, I didn't have that material for listening. And I didn't write the compositions, essays part. Most of them are subjective items. And my performance. You could see the huge range, right? What do you think caused those, you know, fluctuations? Difficulty levels. Okay. First, difficulty levels. What else? Sometimes familiarity of the task types. Okay. And some other reasons. I found some test papers. You see, it's just boring. I just didn't want to do, you know. And some passage, you know, the topics are very interesting. So I just would like to read with Igles, with Igles. Particularly, I'd like to draw your attention to this. That's an immediate Zhejiang. Zhejiang was one of the two provinces in the city, just Zhejiang and Shanghai. Now, they started 2016, this pilot, twice a year, Gaokao, English. For example, Zhejiang, you see, one year, two times, the test takers can sit twice, or Gaokao. And they choose one time, the higher school, for their entrance exam. See my performance? Then I started to think about, perhaps some of you already knew. You see, just last month, this province, with their Gaokao, they got huge problems. After Gaokao, after the waiting, and some test takers and parents, you know, asked why they performed so poorly in some tasks, and then they changed the waiting of some tasks. And the more test takers and parents got into, I should say, rage, rage. Then they cancelled that policy, and some government officials, you know, got into trouble. So you could say, with these examples, you could say we still face a lot of issues with NMT. In my opinion, the major issues are about standards, transparency, accountability, fairness, and so on. I think we are still, we still have a lot of issues to deal with for generations to come. These are my two granddaughters. They are my, you know, energy to work for the future. Here are the major references, and I wish I answered some of Ninda's questions I showed on the first two slides. More questions are welcome. Thank you very much. That's my major talk. Thank you. Questions? Thank you very much for your talk. I should perhaps know this, but is there any attempt to standardize across the provinces? You're explaining to us how some things are allowed to be a little bit different, but is there any overall body that, I know it would be quite difficult, but is there any attempt made to standardize nationally? Thank you very much. Yes, exactly. So the policy for individual provinces to develop their own MMAT started in 2000, mainly 2004, last 10 years. Now we started to use nationwide, you know, the same test papers for the whole country. Only a few provinces and cities like Zhejiang, Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, those four. The provinces and the cities, they are still developing their own MMAT. For the rest, we use the same test papers designed by the Ministry of Education, NIA, I should say, the National Examination Authority, the organization. I remember to call it NIA. Yes, and in China, we have the national curriculum for high school education, one national curriculum, but they allow different textbooks. And because of this, unbalanced development of education in different provinces. So they allowed for 10 years for individual provinces to develop their own test papers. In recent years, the tendency is to use the same test papers again. I call that kind of standardized with the same criteria, same standards. Yes, thanks for the question. Any other questions? Yes, thanks for your talk. So do you see in the near future that the speech component would be included in the Gaokao exam? In the near future? Thank you very much for the question. I don't think I can answer that because I didn't have the right to decide for that. But I predict we will because now Chinese government strongly recommends the use of modern technology and also because some provinces already started to use computer-based speaking tests. So for the near future, I don't know how long it will take, but definitely the government and also people at various levels, they see the importance of including speaking tests in Gaokao English. Thanks. Thank you very much. How is the computer-based speaking test done? Honestly, I think it's not interactive. With computer-based tests, that's always the problem, right? But some task types are like you repeat the sentence and you were given some prompts and you started to present individually and also you got the chance to talk with impairs. I think it's semi-interactive. And to a certain extent, the test taker's speaking ability could be assessed, but not like face-to-face communication. Of course, it depends on how we would define the construct of speaking tests, right? Generally, we think speaking tests should be interactive, right? Authentic and reciprocal. So, yes. That's up to this stage. Thank you very much for that question. Any more questions? Well, can I take this opportunity just to thank Professor Guggenbach for being very interesting. Thank you.