Rubric-based Classroom Assessment For EFL Oral Presentation In College English

Language assessment is an integral part of language teaching and serves as an important way to measure the effect of foreign language learning so as to improve learning quality. When properly developed and used, assessments can help students better understand what they are learning. Classroom assessment is one of instructor’s most essential teaching tools for learning English and has a lot of benefits for students. Thus, nowadays many researchers and teachers become interested in the pedagogical potential of class assessment and also pay more attention to making effective classroom assessment.As oral presentation is one of the main skills of students’ English proficiency, it is paid more attention recently in college English teaching. Some colleges aboard have stressed students’ oral presentation ability for a long time whereas China begins to pay some attention to this important ability for college students.Thus, the effective assessment for English oral presentation is becoming a hot research topic in recent years and the assessing method is worth exploring.but the classroom assessment of oral presentation skills has received little research attention. Meanwhile, the rubric is an important way to assess students’ performance and has been used in many fields, but less researches have been done in English teaching class.Because of the importance of rubrics’ application in assessing English oral presentation in college classroom, the purposes of this study is to explore and discuss the influence of rubric-based classroom assessment on English oral presentation in college through an empirical study.The subjects are 20 university freshmen who are randomly selected from the different two classes for an Experiencing English course in Northwest Normal University. 10 students serve as control group and the other 10 students are experimental(treatment) group. The author spent one semester doing the research and collecting data through questionnaire, pre-test, post-test and the interview. All data collected were analyzed in SPSS.The results of the study show that the rubric-based classroom assessment has great impacts on college students’ English oral presentation ability and students’ learning ability in delivering an English presentation has improved a lot. This kind of assessment method can also facilitate students learning and arouse their learning interest, motivation and confidence. However,the study has some limitations: It did not analyze the influences of rubric-based classroom assessment on teachers’ teaching competence and the size of sample is relatively small. In future studies, it is hoped that the sample of the experiment subjectsshould be expanded appropriately and the impacts of rubric-based classroom assessment on teachers’ teaching competence should be explored systematically.