Analysis of the Mid-term Assessment of the Contr...
In this section，we examine the question of what difficulties Chinese international students encounter in Chinese cinema by focusing on the mid-term tests of the control group.The mid-term test for Chinese cinema is an open-book exam based on a roughly 8 000-word English academic article which deals with early developments in contemporary Chinese literature or film.Each tutorial group is assigned a different article to study outside class，and the exam questions for each tutorial group are basically the same，asking students to identify the research questions，key arguments and research findings of their designated article in a short essay in Chinese of 500 words.
The 20 students in the control group are referred to as C1，C2，C3...C20 according to the ranking of their final results in this subject.As can be seen in Table 8.1，even high-achievers in the H1(80%～100%)category did not perform well in this test，with the top three scoring 77%，falling into the H2A(75%～79%)score band only.Of the remaining 17 students in this group，9 achieved an H2B(70%～74%)，and 8 received a grade of H3 or lower(50%～69%).To gain a better understanding of what prevents the students from achieving higher，it is necessary to analyse the areas in which they lost marks.
Table 8.1 Assessment results(in percentages)for the control group in Chinese cinema
Tests reveal three types of problems that Chinese international students encounter in Chinese cinema.First，students unexceptionally demonstrated low competence in grasping the key contentions of English academic articles，as their answers either addressed the questions in the wrong direction or focused on insignificant aspects of the article.Second，students were insensitive to key concepts or tended to confuse them with less crucial terms.Third，students struggled to use concise language to present their key points，as they generally exceeded the word limit of 500 words by at least 30%.This issue is perhaps related to the previous two，which all point to their insufficient understanding of the text.But in a larger sense，these issues suggest that they lack training in the humanities and are unfamiliar with the ways arguments are developed in English academic articles.