A Study On Methods Of Classroom Assessment And The Effects On Students' Learning Attitude

Assessment is one of the important aspects in EFL teaching. Yet, for many teachers decisions related to the assessment of student learning are an equally important part of their work. However, in a long period time, many teachers and educational authorities considered the paper-and-pencil tests were the only way to evaluate students. This traditional assessment emphasized the product of instruction and neglected teaching process and students performance in classroom. So a large number of students who were concerned more about their scores of the tests, felt anxious and depressed, such attitude has perverted their development of learning ability. In addition to providing standard approaches to test and formal assessment, the field of assessment has put forward to an alternative approaches, which stress students performance and authentic tasks, such as classroom observation, portfolios and student conferences. Student involvement into the assessment process makes them more active, creative and confident in EFL learning.The paper tries to examine the possible factors influencing students' positive attitude towards EFL learning and to find out whether the necessary link of assessment methods exist. The concept of attitude and classroom assessment was based on the discussion by prominent linguistics. It also adopted data analysis to study the effects on students' attitudes. In order to confirm the study, 60 students were selected from Grade 5 of Dalian XiangEr Primary School, Xigang District as the sample. The subjects were required to answer a close questionnaire about attitude towards EFL learning. The result provided some evidences to support the assumption that classroom assessment methods do influence to some degree on students' attitudes towards EFL learning, that is, the alternative assessment approaches make students feel relaxed in class and more confident in evaluation, so more and more students will show their active attitude towards EFL learning.Generally speaking, students in primary school should keep positive attitude to EFL learning, but some of them have shown their negative attitude to it. Therefore, it is significant to study the factors influencing their learning attitude, to reform the EFL curriculum, assessment method and teaching methodologies inorder to facilitate the students' initiative learning ability, strengthen their autonomy and creativities, to improve second language teaching and enhance the success of second language learning. The thesis consists of five chapters:Chapter One is an introduction, which gives a brief account of the background of the researches concerning with this topic. It also gives a very short description of the literature published in China in the field of classroom assessment. In the end the author points out the necessity and validity of carrying out this present study.Chapter Two mainly builds up the theoretical position of language learning assessment from the view of language learning theories and its goals, It provides a detailed discussion about classroom assessment and learning attitudes. Firstly it deals with the context of classroom assessment. It also illustrates the alternative methods of classroom assessment. Then, some previous studies on language learners' attitudes are described in this part. Finally, the relations of classroom assessment and learning attitude are presented.Chapter three focuses on the present study. In this part, the author introduces the assessment methods, the participants' attitude, the data collection system, and the study procedure. It also describes the results of the study, and the analysis of the results.Chapter Four is concerned with the strategies in primary school EFL learning assessment. Here the author illustrates the relevant curriculum and teaching methodologies.The last chapter of this thesis concludes the whole paper and gives some advice for the pedagogy and the future research in this field.