Self-assessment Skills Used By High School Students On Writing

This thesis reports a study of the effect of self-assessment training on writing ability. Self-assessment is important in foreign language learning and teaching because it involves students in identifying standards and criteria, helps them to apply these standards to their writing assignment and to make judgments about the extent to which they have met these criteria and standards. This essay is based on a self-assessment framework using a "teaching as problem solving" approach to analyze instructional practice of EFL writing: The "K-W-L" structure is adopted to collect the writer's difficulties, and to analyze the causes so as to reflect upon the writing process. We believe that if a writer is aware of what his problems are and how they are related to the writing process, then it is possible for him to take steps to adopt relative strategies to deal with actual or anticipated cognitive failure.The subjects — one hundred and five students in senior two from Pinggu Middle School attached to Beijing Normal university participated in this one-term study: the Experimental group consisted of one class of52 students who received self-assessment instruction; the other class of53 was treated as Comparison Group receiving normal instruction. Data were obtained and analyzed through the performance of writing tasks on a pre-post test by the two groups. The results showed that self-assessment training did help students improve their writing ability.