| Educational evaluation means the measurement of teaching according to some specific criteria. It functions as a guide and feedback to the learner and teacher. Evaluation not only provides learners with information on their learning performance so as to guide them to the next steps in the sequence of the subject matter, but also provides information for the teacher's orientation of the next instructional activities. It is one of important and indispensable elements in the whole teaching/learning process.However in the traditional evaluation systems in China, there is an overemphasis on the summative evaluation. Testing is taken as the major, if not the only, means of evaluation. Test scores are considered as the prior criteria by administrators, teachers, students, parents as well as the community to assess the achievement of students. The evaluation on students is based on their test performance rather than on their class performance. This product-oriented evaluation neglects the emotions, attitudes, efforts, strategies, ect. devoted by students in learning the target language, and this kind of evaluation fails to present an all-round vision of students' linguistic, cognitive, and psychological development in the whole learning process. Therefore, setting up a fair, reasonable and scientific evaluation system that fits foreign language teaching in middle school is a new problem waiting to be solved by foreign language teachers. In the past few decades, domestic and international linguists and educationalists wrote many articles and works about formative evaluation, which provided English teaching evaluation with a certain theoretic guidance and practical help. Unfortunately, there is no paper that exclusively investigates the English evaluation in terms of designs, process and results. This article is written for this purpose.This thesis consists of seven parts. The first part comes as an introduction with the focus on foreign language teaching evaluation system in China, and on domestic and international research accomplishments of formative evaluation. Part II analyses the roles of some essential factors in formative evaluation system, after the discussion of the definition as well as the characteristics. The components in the formative evaluation system include teachers, students, schools, parents, society, curriculum and teaching materials, homework and evaluation methods. The core of this thesis is the description and discussion of our experiment on formative evaluation carried out in Foreign Language School attached to Guangxi Normal University. Part III is a general introduction of the experiment in terms of teachers and students involved, time, teaching, materials, and specific means to evaluate. An overall plan for the experiment is also provided in this part. Part IV introduces how the experiment was carried out. It was suggested that formative evaluation can be made in the following two stages: Unit evaluation which mainly evaluates student performance at the end of each unitTerm evaluation which is the evaluation on student comprehensive quality achievement in English studyThe fifth part is a discussion on portfolio assessment and English outside-classroom activity assessment. Student portfolios can have a very specific focus or a broad focus that includes examples of all aspects of language development and learner development. Portfolios promote student ownership of and responsibility for their own learning and students' ability to think critically about homework; student portfolios offer tangible evidence of student learning to be shared with parents, other educators and other students.English outside-classroom activities play another major role in collecting student information which helps make sound and appropriate evaluation.The sixth part shows the results of the experiment. They are demonstrated in the following areas:Student English learning interest has been highly motivated.Student self-study ability has been promoted and their resources for language learning & language...
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