An Experimental Study On The Effect Of Formative Assessment On Students' Oral English Competence

In January, 2004, Ministry of Education issued College English Curriculum Requirements (Trial Edition), in which, formative assessment was advocated to be integrated with summative assessment in evaluating the students' English learning and some forms of formative assessment were listed such as the students' self-assessment, peer assessment, and assessment conducted by teachers and school administrators. Since then, many English teachers and educators in China's universities have done much research on teaching assessment, especially formative assessment, but their research is mainly focused on the introduction of the related theories, not the experimental study.Through an experiment, this thesis tries to prove that formative assessment can exert a positive effect on students' attitude towards English learning, their motivation, interest, learner autonomy and collaborative learning, thus leading to an improvement of their oral English competence. This experiment took two non-English major classes as the subjects, who entered the university in 2005 and would start from College English band 2 since they had better command of basic English compared with the average students. One of the classes was taken as the experimental class and the other being the control class. Before the experiment, the two classes were given an oral English test, the result of which were processed and analyzed with the statistic software SPSS and showed no statistically significant difference between the two classes in oral English competence. Then formative assessment was implemented in the experimental class and it would take 50% in the final score and the terminal examination would take another 50%, while the control class would just have 30% for their daily work and 70% for the terminal examination. After two semesters of experiment, the two classes were given another oral English test, the result of which were processed and analyzed with the same software SPSS and showed statistic significance of difference. Then the oral English pretests and posttests of the two classes were compared respectively with the same software SPSS and the two paired sample T-test results showed both statistically significant difference, which meant both the classes had made much progress in oral English, but the extent of the progress of the experimental class was much higher than that of the control class. In the implementation of formative assessment, three forms of assessment were adopted: students' self-assessment, peer assessment, and teacher assessment. The assessment was based on the records of students' classroom activities, extracurricular activities, online learning, portfolio, and the interviews. While the instruments for this research are mainly test, questionnaire, and interview.The experimental results show that formative assessment, supported with constructivism, humanism, and multi-intelligence theory, can exert positive effect on students' attitude, motivation, and interest, thus improving their oral English competence, and the improvement of students' practical language competence, especially speaking and listening, is just the goal the present college English reform aims to attain. Meanwhile, formative assessment can also improve students' learner autonomy and collaborative learning, which shows a great prospect since the online autonomous learning is now attached more and more importance to.