Abstract:
The Preliminary Chinese Proficiency Test (Pre-CPT) is a norm-referenced standardized test designed to measure proficiency in listening and reading in Cantonese. It can be used for admission, placement, achievement, and program evaluation purposes. It is appropriate for students who have studied Cantonese for one year at the college level or three or four years at the high school level. Test items for written Cantonese are authentic samples taken from Chinese signs, captions, newspapers, and novels. The spoken language cassette tape includes passages from television, radio, movies, and recorded conversations. An additional structure portion assesses the student's ability to recognize correct syntactic patterns. Test administration time is approximately two hours and test items have four possible multiple-choice responses which are recorded by the examinee on a machine-scored answer sheet. Of the 651 examinees whose performance on the Pre-CPT established the norms, 47% were native speakers of either Mandarin or some other Chinese language. Since Mandarin and Cantonese are considered to be dialects of the same language, test users should note that the scores of examinees who do not speak a variety of Chinese other than Cantonese as a native language are being compared to norms established on a sample almost half of whom do. Reliability of the three subtests ranges from .88 - .94. Scores on the Pre-CPT correspond positively to the amount of language instruction an examinee has received. No correlation coefficient is reported, however. The percentile rankings needed to interpret obtained scores are present in the Test Interpretation Manual. The CPT, as opposed to the Pre-CPT, is intended for use with students who have studied Cantonese for two years in college. Its norms were established on 2000 examinees, 96% of whom were native speakers of English. Reliability on the three sections ranges from .83 - .93. The CPT is cross-validated with the proficiency scale of the Federal Interagency Language Roundtable and has a correlation coefficient of .92 on the reading section and .85 on the listening section. Test administration time is approximately 3 hours. In all other respects, the information regarding the Pre-CPT (above) applies.