A Comparative Analysis of Science and Arts Students’ Performance in CET Band 4 and Its Pedagogical Implications

The present research, taking Science and Arts students from respectively three typical Science and Arts schools of Shanxi Normal University as an example, is intended to make a contrastive examination of Science and Arts students’ CET Band 4 performance and attempt to find out how the two groups of students differ from each other in their respective performance in the three parts of the test including listening, reading and writing, and finally discuss the possible reasons. It is revealed that Arts students’ overall performance in the parts of listening, writing is better than that of Science students, meanwhile Science students manifest better reading performance than Arts students. Due to the differences in majors and expertise, Science and Arts students manifest much difference in such aspects as background knowledge, thinking patterns and learning strategy preference, etc. which may lead to their differences in CET Band 4 scores. Considering the differences between Science and Arts students in their learning styles, thinking patterns and learning strategy preference, etc., we propose some suggestions with the intention to help both Arts and Science students to overcome their respective weaknesses so as to improve their comprehensive language competence