Effects Of Formative Assessment Based On China’s Standards Of English Language Ability On Senior High School Students’ English Writing Language

Writing plays an important role in English teaching.Writing assessment is the key part in English writing teaching.The English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(2017Edition,revised in 2020)emphasizes the implement of formative assessment in high schools.However,the practical application of formative assessment in English writing teaching in senior high schools in China is still not satisfactory.China’s Standards of English Language Ability is the first English language ability standard covering the whole education section in China,which provides a reference standard for formative assessment.According to the descriptions of CSE,this study selects vocabulary use,grammar use,theme content,text structure and cohesion as the five dimensions of the Analytic Rating Scale,which is used for assessing students’ English writing.Based on the theory of the Noticing Hypothesis,the Interaction Hypothesis and Zone of Proximal Development,this study applies CSE in formative assessment of writing,trying to explore the effect of this writing assessment on senior high school students’ English writing.This study focuses on the following two questions:(1)What effect does the formative assessment based on CSE have on the students’ English writing accuracy?(2)What effect does the formative assessment based on CSE have on the students’ English writing complexity?In this study,60 students from two classes of Grade Two in a high school in Yueyang City were taken as the experimental subjects.The two classes were divided into experimental class and control class.During the experiment,writing formative assessment was carried out by regular writing tests.In the experimental class,the Analytic Rating Scale based on the CSE was applied to assess students’ writing,while in the control class,the holistic rating was adopted,and the experiment lasted for 16 weeks.After the experiment,the Lexical Complexity Analyzer(LCA),the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA)and SPSS26.0 were used to analyze the collected writing texts.The findings are as follows:(1)The result of post-test illustrates that there is a significant difference between the language accuracy of the experimental class and the control class(p=.039<.05),which shows that formative assessment of high school English writing based on the CSE has a positive effect on the improvement of accuracy;(2)There exists obvious difference between the lexical complexity of the experimental class and the control class(p=.005<.05),but little difference between syntax complexity(p=.660>.05),indicating that formative assessment of high school English writing based on the CSE can effectively improve the lexical complexity of students’ English writing of high school students’ writing and has no obvious effect on the syntax complexity.This research shows that the formative assessment of writing based on the CSE has great reference value and practical significance for effectively improving the accuracy and complexity of high school students’ English writing.