A Study On Formative Assessment In Basic English Teaching Of Vocational College English Majors

Assessment is considered a significant factor in English teaching.Formative assessment is an ongoing assessment that can provide additional qualitative information on students' learning progress.Based on the theory of humanism,constructivism and Multiple Intelligences,formative assessment provides students with many opportunities of improving and perfecting themselves. With the immediate verbal feedback,students can easily monitor their learning process.Through formative assessment,teachers not only assess students' cognitive ability,but also know about their feelings,behaviors,interests and attitudes.The information gathered from the assessment is used to adapt teaching and learning to meet students' needs and improve teaching quality.The significance and necessity of formative assessment have been well acknowledged in the educational field.The Ministry of Education has issued the new English Curriculum Standard (ECS).The new evaluation system emphasizes on the combination of summative assessment and formative assessment,that is to say,both learning results and learning process should be evaluated.However,research in China on the theory and Practice of formative assessment are mainly carried out in the field of elementary education.Few research and experiments have been carried out at college level,let alone in vocational colleges.This thesis is an application of formative assessment in Basic English teaching for Business English majors.The experiment was conducted to testify three hypotheses:1.Formative assessment improves students' learning autonomy.2.Formative assessment improves students' self-management ability.3.Formative assessment is especially beneficial to those low-achievers. The subjects are 85 Business English majors from school of foreign language,Tieling Normal College.The two classes are divided into experimental group(EG) and controlled group(CG). Pre-test results showed that the control and experimental students are nearly at the same English level before the experiment.Formative assessment is adopted in EG and summative assessment in CG.The methods of data collection are observation,questionnaires,interviews,portfolios, self-assessment and peer assessment.The process of research is divided into four steps.Firstly, the students' difficulties in English learning are diagnosed.Then,the research objectives are established based on students' difficulties.Thirdly,formative assessment is carried out.At last,an overall evaluation is made according to the process and results of the research. After one semester's experiment,the findings drawn from data analysis colleted in the experiment testified the pre-set three hypotheses,that formative assessment can really improve students' learning autonomy and self-management ability;still further,it is also beneficial for low-achievers.On this sense,the research has its practical significance.On the other hand,the research also has some limitations due to the small size of subjects and short time of implementation.