A Study On The Implementation Of Formative Assessment In EFL Teaching For English Majors

Research on educational assessment has been a major field of the western education since R. W Tyler, the famous American educator, first put forward the concept of "educational assessment" in 1930s. Great achievement in this field has been accomplished both at home and abroad.Educational assessment is a vital part of course instruction. Functions of assessment are typically classified as formative and summative according to their different functions in the process of instruction. Weaknesses and problems of the traditional assessment system lead to the advocacy of formative assessment. Formative assessment has become a popular topic in language learning and teaching in China recently. The past six years (2001-2006) has seen a great increase in the number of empirical studies on formative assessment and related articles in domestic ELT journals. Most of the researches on the theory and practice of formative assessment are carried out in the field of elementary education, especially in mathematics and science courses. Few studies, however, build on longitudinal researches at the university level investigating the possible effects of formative assessment on students'English learning, especially for English majors or discuss the potential problems that would have in the implementation of formative assessment.The present study is based on a program entitled as"Research on Assessment Model for Students Portfolios in RICH Teaching"in Foreign Languages College of Zhejiang Normal University during September, 2003 to September, 2004. It was aimed to improve the assessment models in students'English learning by adopting student portfolios in the process of their learning on the basis of experiment. The experiment was carried out to six classes of freshmen entering college in 2003 in Comprehensive English Course. In the three experimental classes, RICH teaching and formative assessment were adopted, while in the other three controlled classes, the traditional teacher-centered teaching and summative assessment were employed. The subjects are 168 senior English majors in FLC, ZNU in their last semester, all of whom participated in the program in the 2003-2004 academic year.Within this framework the present study goes further to explore the effects of the program on students'English learning in the following three years and the potential problems existed in the application of formative assessment. The research questions to be addressed are mainly: Will students'learning be influenced by different forms of assessment? If so, in what ways the influences are? What kinds of problems exist in the implementation of formative assessment in practice? How can it be improved?The data were collected through one questionnaire, student and teacher interviews during April- June, 2007, learner journals and portfolio samples derived from Research Institute Office of RICH. An Independent Samples T-test was applied to find out whether there existed any difference between the two groups'responses to the questionnaire. In the results and discussion part, data were analyzed with qualitative results integrated into the quantitative part as further illustrations in most sections.The study has the following findings:⑴Different assessment systems do have different influences on students'English learning based on the statistic analysis of the two groups'responses to the questionnaire.⑵Formative assessment is more effective than summative assessment in promoting students'English learning. Formative assessment facilitates students to strengthen motivation, form positive learning attitudes and learning habits, enjoy various learning activities, develop self-reflective learning strategies thus to promote English learning achievement and comprehensive accomplishments.⑶Learner autonomy can be partly achieved by integrating formative assessment into teaching.⑷The portfolio, which provides information about individual student's learning, is an effective assessment tool in facilitating students'English learning.⑸Teachers, while conducting formative assessment in class are more expected to assist students to grow up as creative and autonomous learners for life by providing substantial learning opportunities and shifting their roles.Finally the thesis attempts to probe into the potential problems and prospect of the implementation of formative assessment in EFL teaching in college for English majors, as well as put forward the limitations of the study and recommendations for future research.