Using Performance Assessment In Task-Based Language Teaching

In the 1990's, Performance Assessment has been accepted as an improvement to errors in the traditional assessment in U.S.A. The Performance Assessment used in TBLT is designed to help language teachers to judge whether the students are becoming competent, purposeful language users based on their language performance. The aim of Performance Assessment has served its function by shifting from punishing or awarding students to focusing on their development and helping students and teachers monitor the whole learning process. This mode of assessment is students-centered, which can hopefully help students to become critical, creative and independent thinkers who are able to analyze and apply facts rather than just repeat them.Because of history and many social factors, paper-and-pen-based testing has been the unitary way of assessment in China for many years, which fails to reflect the students' real language competence and higher-order thinking skills. Paper-and-pen-based testing is summative, which takes the score as the only standard to assess students' learning quality while the learning process and daily learning performance are far from focused on. In order to assess students' language comprehensive competence appropriately, it is necessary to reform the present state that paper-and-pen-based testing is acted as only one way to measure students, and use Performance Assessment in language teaching to enrich the assessment modes in China. Therefore, this very thesis reviews and introduces the historical background, the reasons of originality, connotation, features, functions, and restrictions of Performance Assessment. What's more, it deducts the relationship between TBLT and Performance Assessment, and puts forward some positive suggestions on how to design performance tasks in detail. Besides, it analyzes the assessment problems in professional technical colleges in terms of action research and concludes the necessity of assessment reform. In this very thesis, each step of Performance Assessment based on action research has been introduced concretely.