A Study On Application Of Formative Assessment To College English Writing Teaching

Writing teaching has always been as an integral part of the college English teaching, but its results have remained unsatisfactory. At present, the profound revolution conducted in college English teaching has made assessment, an essential element in teaching practice, one of the main fields for research. Ever since it was brought out in the1970s, formative assessment has aroused numerous discussions and studies. Foreign studies on it has gained notable fruits while in China, studies are mainly focused on the theoretical level, and most empirical studies are based on the classes in primary and middle schools. Study of its application in foreign language class, especially the college English class is still in need of replenishment. Considering the current situation of college English writing teaching, this research applies the formative assessment into it tentatively and tries to explore the influence that formative assessment exerts on students’ writing proficiency.Compared with traditional summative assessment, formative assessment attaches more importance to the process of learning, with multiple types and tools of assessing to provide timely and effective feedback to facilitate teaching and learning. Combining self-assessment, peer-assessment and teacher-assessment, portfolio is the best tool for implementing formative assessment in the writing class. By employing the portfolio-based formative assessment, this research has carried out a fourteen-week experiment on two non-English-major classes in the Central China Normal University. Results of the pretest show that writing proficiency of the two classes are identical at first. Then formative assessment is conducted in the experimental class while summative assessment in the control class. Results of the posttest after the experiment show that though the writing proficiency in both classes has improved, the experimental class reveals a far more remarkable improvement than the control class. Meanwhile, questionnaire and interviews carried out in the experimental class after the experiment, together with data from the portfolios demonstrate that formative assessment has made positive contributions to the learning strategies, learning attitude and learner autonomy.This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter is a brief introduction about current situation of college English writing teaching and states the aim and significance for doing this research. Chapter two reviews the previous studies of formative assessment, theoretically and empirically. In chapter three, design of the empirical study on the application of formative assessment to college English writing teaching is presented, covering the research hypotheses, research subjects, research instruments and the detailed procedure, methods of data collection and analysis included as well. Chapter four is devoted to the research results and discussions of the major findings. The last chapter is the conclusion of the thesis and the implications this empirical study brings on the implementation of formative assessment, meanwhile, limitation of the study is stated as well.