A Study Of The Formative Assessment Of Vocational School Students' English Learning

Assessment of students in foreign language learning is a process of gathering and organizing information, which gives teachers and students a clear understanding of how and what the students learn in order to improve their foreign language learning.The present assessment system in vocational schools in our country mainly relies on summative assessment, and the exam result is still regarded as the only criterion. Most of the students in vocational schools lose confidence and interest in learning English because they always got low scores in the summative assessment, which focus on the final achievement. This even makes them lose confidence in themselves. It is not conducive to fully understanding and assessing a student. Therefore, we must seek for an assessment model that can arouse students' interest and confidence in English learning.Howard Gardner suggested that each individual holds at least eight relatively independent mental abilities or intelligences. They take part together in complicated modes and occur in everyone in different ways. Everyone's mental ability which is relative weak can be improved by positive encouragement and instruction. From 1970s, According to humanistic theory in education, the receiver in education is first regarded as a human being, then a learner. If a person cannot satisfy his basic needs physically and psychologically, he will surely fail to concentrate on his language learning whole-heartedly. John Flavell, a professor of Stanford University, first put forward the concept of meta-cognition, which can be best summed up by the phrase: "thinking about thinking". Meta-cognition stresses the role of reflection. The purpose of reflection is to learn from experiences. Based on the theories above, assessment to students' learning cannot be limited to assess the final result of learning, formative assessment should be used to concern with the students' abilities that behave in the learning process, and to instruct students to concern with and reflect upon the learning process of their own and their patterns so as to improve their studying. Thus, this thesis makes the following hypotheses to the problems that exist in the assessment to vocational school students' English learning:1) Formative assessment will help boost up students' interest in English learning.2) Formative assessment will help arouse students' confidence in English learning.3) Formative assessment will help improve students' English learning outcome.This thesis involves two empirical studies. The first one is a questionnaire survey carried out in 167students and 26 English teachers from four vocational schools in Hengyang. The analysis of data shows most of the students are not interested in English learning and have not enough confidence in it. The students think their teachers do not really care for the process of English learning but the scores.The second empirical study is an experiment, which lasts a semester in Hengyang Normal School for Kindergarten. Summative assessment is still used in the controlled class, while the assessment model, which mainly consists of formative assessment supplemented by summative assessment, is used in the experimental class. The process of the students' English learning is recorded by the assessment tools such as observation, conference, portfolio assessment, self-assessment and peer assessment. An assessment to the students is given in the form of overall scores adding up term comments. Finally, a questionnaire survey is carried out again in the experimental class. The contrasting results of post-experiment data and the pre-experiment data show that the students' outcome, interest and confidence in English learning have improved obviously.Certainly there are some limitations of formative assessment that can be found in the research, such as formative assessment requires too much time and energy; the reliability needs further improvement. The researcher also gives some pedagogical implications and advice: formative assessment and summative assessment should be integrated; the principle of student-centered should be truly put into effect; reflection of formative assessment should play an active role not only in students' learning but also in teachers' instruction; more abilities of students' should be found in the process of applying formative assessment.