Research On The Application Of Formative Assessment In Senior High School English Reading Teaching

Teaching evaluation is an important part of English teaching activities which includes formative assessment and summative assessment.Formative assessment lays more stress on students’ learning progress,aiming to forecast students’ potentials,develop and improve students’ learning abilities.Not only does formative assessment focus on enhancing students’ learning methods,but also it provides valuable feedback for teachers.Summative assessment is the main way to evaluate students for a long time,which evaluates students ’ learning based on assignments or examinations.However,with the process of education reform,more and more educators realize that summative assessment has many obvious disadvantages.The New English Curriculum in 2001 pointed out that “In English teaching process,formative assessment should be used as the main assessment.English teaching should focus on training students’ active learning and build up students’ learning confidence.” Some researchers have made formative assessment to judge the English progress.However few scholars do researches on the application of formative assessment in English reading teaching.The author tries to make a study of putting formative assessment into English reading teaching in senior high school.After collecting and analyzing the existing relevant studies of formative assessment at home and abroad,the author designs an experimental study.This research was conducted in Xuzhou No.3 Middle School of Jiangsu Province through the integrated use of classroom observation,questionnaire and individual interview research methods.Two classes of senior one students of the same proficiency in English are randomly chosen as a control class and an experimental class.In teaching process,the experimental class is taught with formative assessment while the students in the control class are taught with summative assessment.In this paper,the main research questions are:(1)Is it effective to use formative assessment to improve the high school students’ reading abilities and their reading interest?(2)What are the problems during the application?(3)What are the possible solutions to solve the problems?From the analysis of data collected in this survey and the comparison between pre-test score and post-test score,the author believes that proper use of formative assessment will help students improve their reading ability.It also can develop students’ learning interest,learning confidence and cooperative spirit.Moreover,teachers’ role has changed under formative assessment and become a guider and monitor in the learning process.However,in this process of practical application,some questions can be found.For example,it is difficult to operate formative assessment during the English reading class.Both teachers’ conservative concept about formative assessment and the examination-oriented education system go against the application of formative assessment.The author then attempts to put forward some suggestions to solve these problems.They mainly involve three aspects: the improvement of teachers’ knowledge about formative assessment,scientific application and the combination of formative assessment and summative assessment.However,the study is only a tentative one and it has some limitations and problems.