An Empirical Study On Application Of Formative Assessment To English Majors In China

Assessment is an integral part of English instruction. The role of assessment has been crucial with its influences on the lives of learners, teachers and administrators (Gredler, 1999). With a view to keeping up with the international tendency of assessment, improving teaching quality, and meeting the needs of teaching reform throughout the country, both English experts and teachers have been working on an alternative assessment system. At present, the assessment reform experiments, which focus on formative assessment, have been carried out in most parts of the country with the implementation of General Senior Middle School English Course Criteria (Trial Edition), that is, New English Curriculum Standard (ECS) in 2001.However, the research on the theory and practice of formative assessment in China has been mainly carried out in the field of elementary education. Formative assessment at the university level comes to a new era which attaches much emphasis to formative assessment with the publication of Curriculum requirements for college English teaching in Feb., 2004. The requirements indicates that the focus of assessment should be on learners' ability to use English in communication, particularly their ability to speak and write English, and formative assessment should be combined with summative assessment so that it can put equal emphasis on both process and outcomes. However, few studies have been made on English majors in connection with learning strategies, learning attitudes and learning outcomes, which are the focus of this study. The present study was carried out in the specific context of East-China Institute of Technology in China, among English majors in their second year. It attempts to explore the following questions:(1) How different are English learning strategies employed by English majors in both the treatment class and the control class before and after the application of formative assessment?(2) How different are English learning attitudes of English learners in both the treatment class and the control class before and after the implementation of formative assessment?(3) What are the relationships between formative assessment and English learning strategies, English learning attitudes, and learning outcomes?The present study adopts quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the influence conducted by formative assessment on learning strategies, learning attitudes and learning outcomes of English majors. The data were collected through the Likert Scale questionnaire of English learning strategies and learning attitudes as well as the TEM 4 tests. Sixty second-year English majors from foreign language school in E.C.I.T. participated in this investigation. The questionnaire was administered to them in order to elicit data concerning students' strategy use and their learning attitudes changing. Students' achievements in the TEM 4 tests before and after the experiment were used to assess students' learning outcomes before and after the appliance of formative assessment between the treatment and control class. SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) 16.0 was employed to analyze the quantitative data from the questionnaire and the test: (1) descriptive statistics were employed to summarize the students' responses to strategy items and learning attitudes items; (2) independent samples t-tests were carried out to check the differences between the treatment class and the control class in the use of English learning strategies and learning attitudes before and after the experiment. (3) paired samples t-tests were conducted to analyze whether there is prominent difference existing in the treatment class itself before and after the experiment in terms of learning strategies, learning attitudes and learning outcomes.The results of this study indicate: (1)formative assessment influences the dynamic changes in the use of English learning strategy; (2)formative assessment influences the attitudes of English learning of English majors; and (3)the application of both summative assessment and formative assessment to English majors can quickly promote students' learning ability as well as their academic performance through influencing their use of learning strategies and their learning attitudes.Although restricted by such factors as the limitation of time and samples, etc., based on this study, these findings suggest that the application of formative assessment can not only influence the learners' learning strategies used and learning attitudes held, but can also further influence their English learning ability and learning achievements, especially English learners' reading and writing ability.