The Consequential Aspect of test validity and the impact of College English Test of China

I examine in this talk the ways newspaper reporters 'represent' interaction in the language of the news. I am interested in exploring the concept of 'accessed voice' (Hartley, 1982), in other words, who is given voice in the press and how this voice is reported. Since most of the time 'news is what is said', the values and words of a privileged body of people who have special roles in society are generally put forward. Women in general are part of the unacessed voice group and the small quantity of female speech reported in the press is sufficient to demonstrate that their social role has a special or deviant status. Unequal access is evident in what is reported and who speaks, and as a consequence, the linguistic code imposes and reinforces attitudes and values on what it represents. By using examples from corpus analysis, the other question I want to discuss here is the differential manner in which women and men are described and categorised in the discourse of the media.