The Effects Of Formative Assessment On Learner Autonomy In English Teaching

The implementation of formative assessment enriches and extends greatly the existing English teaching assessment methods with students' learning process being motivated, monitored and modified. Theoretically speaking, formative assessment fosters learner autonomy from all technical, psychological, socio-cultural and critical perspectives.Within one-year duration, an empirical research was conducted to explore whether and how far formative assessment fostered learner autonomy from the four dimensions mentioned above. The study took place in Dalian University of Technology within 218 subjects. Participates were drawn from first year students with various academic backgrounds and were divided into treatment group and control group. Ongoing formative assessment, as the research intervention, was embedded within the context of a target English unit. A mixed of methods of questionnaire survey, student interview, classroom observation and portfolio analysis were used to measure outcomes.Questionnaire survey was designed and devised based on Oxford's autonomous learning model and relevant interviews. After several item and factor analyses in small and large sample tests, 66 items remained from the original 154 items, consisting of technical dimension, psychological dimension, socio-cultural dimension and critical dimension. In reliability test the Cronbachαwas 0.9346 and in validity test the t test value was 0.256 between students of different academic achievement. Through data analysis of the questionnaires, results revealed that no significant difference emerged between the levels of learner autonomy pre-and-post experiments, but the increase of levels of learner autonomy from technical perspective was statistically significant.It's also found from interviews that students shared positive attitudes toward formative assessment viewing formative assessment as a strategy for the improvement of English knowledge and cultivation of learner autonomy. Moreover, students were observed according to class activities and portfolios, to utilize a variety of strategies in situational conditions, undergo a serial of characteristics changes, realize mediated learning through interaction and hold critical concepts on power, access and ideology.