The Research Of Formative Evaluation Applied To College Oral English Teaching

With the reform of new curriculum, more and more emphasis is attached to student oral competence in EFT. Therefore, oral competence assessment is in an urgent need. However, oral competence assessment in EFT has always been a headache to teachers, and was often neglected in large-scale examinations. As there was a lack of effective assessing scheme, graduates often turn out poor in oral competence after years of studying English. Under the influence of structural linguistics, language tests were designed to assess learners' mastery of the linguistic system such as phoneme discrimination, grammatical knowledge etc., mainly tested by multiple choice and cloze passage. With the popularity of communicative approaches, modern EFT highlights the instrumental value of language and emphasizes student oral competence. We are in an urgent need of an effective assessment system to evaluate student oral competence. It would be both more informative for the teacher and fairer to the students to have some continuous record of the students' oral performance on in different occasions and for different purposes.In recent years much has been discussed on formative assessment in the journals such as Foreign Language Teaching in Schools. Many booklets on alternatives assessment have also been published. However, there still few on the application of formative assessment. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how to develop college students' oral competence through formative assessment and this will serve as a paradigm to help other teachers understand the employment of formative assessment to promote learning and teaching. The discussion in this paper is based on the experiment in my class.The paper has four chapters.In chapter 1, the thesis explores the significance of the research, the content and purpose of the research.In chapter 2, the thesis gives an exposition of the present research on formative assessment at home and abroad and introduces the theoretical basis of the pedagogy and psychology of formative assessment together with other theories concerning with formative assessment. In chapter 3, based on the current teaching practice, the author explores how to carry out formative assessment in oral English in EFT. This chapter contents the whole process of the experiment. By describing the contents of formative assessment, various evaluation tools designed by the author are showed. The evaluation object is introduced, and finally some problems which teacher should pay attention to on how to use formative assessment more effectively in oral English Teaching are mentioned.In chapter 4, based on the results of the study, the author analyzes the effects on students' "learning" as well as on teachers' "teaching". The thesis analyzes the various statistic results, including examination results, the results of questionnaires done by the students and parents and the author's reviews of teaching practice. It proves that formative assessment applied to the teaching of oral English is practical and effective. Finally the author summarizes the experiment and raises some questions remaining to be solved.Sincerely, the author hopes the paper can offer some help and new ways to people who are researching and carrying out formative assessment in oral English class in EFT.