Aligning A-level Mandarin Chinese listening and reading to the CEFR: a teacher-based inquiry

This article reports on a standard setting study involving 12 teachers of the Pearson Edexcel A-level Chinese examination in England. The study investigated what the A-level Chinese examination is intended to measure, that is, the content validity of the test papers, through close scrutiny of item input and task design. Listening and Reading items from two test papers were presented to teacher participants one by one. Participants were asked to rate the difficulty of each item against the CEFR descriptors and to provide evaluative comments on their ratings across two rounds. The ratings were analysed quantitatively to estimate inter-rater reliability and intra-rater variability, while panel discussions were thematically analysed to explore the reasoning behind the ratings. The study underscores the importance of rigorous evaluation of foreign language examinations in England and contributes to a better understanding of the alignment between the A-level Chinese examination and the CEFR.