Effect Of Formative Assessment On Vocabulary Learning Of Non-English Majors

listening, speaking, reading, writing, and translating can not be developed without certain amount of vocabulary (Lewis, 1993, cited by Guo & Zhou, 2006). Since 1990s, there have been more and more empirical studies of second language vocabulary acquisition. In those studies, the researchers have studied vocabulary, led by different theories in various perspectives, like the cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, semantics, stylistics, pragmatics, cross-cultural communication and corpus. However, till now, not much research was done in assessment aspect. This thesis mainly explores the effect of formative assessment on vocabulary learning of non-English majors.Researches on assessment were developed very early, but assessment for learning (formative assessment) was recent concern in China. Formative assessment is to be interpreted as encompassing all those activities undertaken by teachers, and/or by their students, which provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they engaged (Black & William, 1998). Researches in China on the formative assessment for learning are mainly concentrated in the field of elementary education. Few empirical researches on formative assessment have been carried out in college English classes. However, college English Curriculum Requirements advocates that special attention should be paid to the implementation of formative assessment in English teaching, and a new system of educational assessment should be established. Based on the above reason and requirement, the present study attempts to explore the following research questions: 1) Can formative assessment facilitate non-English majors'vocabulary learning? 2) Can frequent testing promote the effect of formative assessment? 3) What is the student's attitude toward formative assessment in vocabulary learning?This research was an experimental study, which explored the impact of formative assessment on vocabulary teaching in twelve weeks. The subjects were sophomores from three classes of non-English majors, two experimental groups and one control group. Before the experiment, all the three classes took the pre-test within 30 minutes. During the experiment process, both experimental classes experienced formative assessment activities, like peer-assessment, dictation, etc. And one of the experimental classes had unit vocabulary test, besides formative assessment activities. After a semester learning, the three classes took the same vocabulary size test again. The results of the test indicated that both classes have improved in vocabulary learning, and students in the experimental classes made greater progress than control class. But progress of the two experimental classes was almost the same, i.e. the experimental class with the added frequent vocabulary tests didn't progress greater than the other experimental class. After the experiment, an interview with students and teaching diary were used to understand the students and teacher's attitudes toward formative assessment in classroom. The result showed that they agreed with most of the formative assessment methods, which were useful and practicable in classroom vocabulary teaching.The results of this study indicated that formative assessment could facilitate non-English majors'vocabulary learning; and both students and teacher could accept formative assessment in English classroom; but frequent vocabulary tests did not necessarily improve English vocabulary learning, which depended on the design of the tests and the actual use of them. The most important reason for the failure of frequent testing in this study was without high qualify feedback information. So the more specific the feedback about errors and steps to improve learning, the more students will improve (Elawer & Corno, 1985).Based on these findings, this study suggests practicing formative assessment in other English skills; doing a further research on frequent testing in English teaching; and creating more concrete and effective formative assessment activities.