The Research On Formative Assessment Applied To Task-based Classes

In recent years, with the growing of China’s economic strength, China is playing an increasingly important role on the world stage. Therefore, there are a growing number of people from abroad want to learn Chinese. Mandarin is specified by the Chinese government as the national language. For the foreigners who want to know more about China, learning Mandarin is very critical. Confucius Institute as the official agency of the country which is in order to promote Chinese language appeared in such international situation. Confucius Institutes have been established more than400in180countries around the world and this number is constantly growing. Therefore, the researches about Confucius Institutes are more and more. The teaching object, teaching environment, teaching content from Chinese class of Confucius Institute from classroom has its own characteristics, so it is necessary for teachers to design more targeted teaching plans. According to my own teaching experiences which I got when I was working at the Confucius Institute at University of Hawaii, I have been trying to find a more suitable method of student assessment.TBLT (Task-based Language Teaching) produced in the1980s, the pedagogic principle of TBLT is as following:student centered, task-based, communicative, meaning-based, differentiated instruction, varied modalities and so on. Being different from other teaching methods, the class of TBLT has its own characteristic; the students who are in the TBLT classroom do not need to master the knowledge of Chinese grammar and vocabulary, but the ability of fulfilling a task of language which was training is needed. It is also very necessary for the teachers who are using TBLT to develop a special student assessment method to match the way they are teaching.Formative assessment is an integral part of language teaching and learning. It is characterized by providing honest feedbacks about both teaching and learning timely. Therefore students will adjust their learning strategies and teachers will convert their ways of teaching according to honest feedbacks provided by the student formative assessment. Teachers need to consider the multi-factor for students when they are using this type of formative assessment in their language class, so they can design a more pertinent formative assessment to the students. The thesis will focus on how to design and implement a suitable type of student formative assessment in the TBLT class, according to the author’s teaching experiences at Confucius Institute at the University of Hawaii for one year, and the author will give scientific and reasonable proposal about how to design and implement a student formative assessment.The thesis comprises of5chapters.The first chapter is the introduction of this thesis. The author will introduces the theory outlined of this article and the reason why the topic covered in the paper about the two aspects which are TBLT and student formative assessment is picked.The second chapter is the main part of this thesis. The author will describe how to establish the more scientific purposes and principles of the formative assessment specifically at the beginning of established this type of the student formative assessment according to the problems author encountered in the classroom and the characteristics of student. The third chapter of this paper is very important. The thesis will focus on the specific tools and methods of student formative assessment in the TBLT class in this chapter, and will give the answers of both two questions which are "What are kinds of tools should be used in the TBLT class" and "how do you assess the real language level of the students ". The reader will know, by the author’s detailed description, the formative assessment tools and methods applied by the author more comprehensively and specifically.The fourth chapter is about the effect of the student formative assessment the author used in the TBLT class. In this chapter the author will analyze the effectiveness of the student formative assessment according to feedback the students gave. The reader may know, by the author’s introduce, the real effect of the student formative assessment the author applied in the TBLT class.The fifth chapter is the last section of this article. The author will summarize, according to the content of other chapters, several aspects of student formative assessment system designed by the teachers of TBLT class should pay particular attention to. And at same time, the article will give a few amendments to the student formative assessment system the author used in the TBLT class. In the last part of this chapter, author will point out the disadvantages of this thesis.