Research into Sexism in Language Testing & Its Implications to Language Testing in China

This paper reviews foreign and domestic sexism research and practice in language testing and reveals that China lags behind in this sociolinguistics perspective in both theoretical study and practice. The paper indicates that sexism is represented in the listening comprehension section in National Matriculation English Test (NMET) after a case study into the listening comprehension part in NMET 2000-2005. It is hoped this tentative research will trigger more studies, ameliorate language testing practice in the perspective of gender equality and reduce DIF [differential item functioning] (from which validity will suffer) in especially large scale language testing programs. (Contains 1 endnote.)