An Exploration Of Formative Assessment In Middle School English Teaching

In recent years, English teaching assessment reformation becomes an importantrealistic problem in the middle schools in China. We have lacked general analysis totraditional test and all-around comprehension to the meaning of learning assessmentfor many years. It means that there is a shortcoming in the field of assessment.Teachers and educators should reflect and advocate new principles, means andmethods of assessment. Especially on the background of new curriculum reform, ourlanguage teachers should focus on assessment reform. Based on this problem, thispaper is trying to explore an efficient way of how to assess middle school students'English learning more rationally, and propose a practical Formative Assessmentmode.This thesis is divided into five chapters.In the first chapter, some shortcomings of present English teaching assessment inmiddle school are indicated. Nowadays standardized test is still a large-scale appliedassessment mode in middle schools, but it has a vital shortcoming: it can't cover allthe purposes of educational, that is it only focuses on the assessment of the ability ofmastering knowledge but not applying it. So Formative Assessment is just a necessarysupplement to today's simplex test.Chapter Two represents some theoretic background of assessment and researchesin China. From B.S. Bloom's Assessment Classification to Arthur Hughes' BackwashEffect, especially Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligence gives us manyilluminations and gradually discovers the nature of assessment, which meanscurriculum assessment is not a sole form that is set in concrete but a dynamic ongoingsystem, changing with students' learning and teachers' teaching.After reviewing these theories, Chapter 3 describes a practical, useful assessmentmode, which is Formative Assessment in the following aspects: the meaning andfunctions of Formative Assessment and the distinction among several similar words ofFormative Assessment with the aim of exploring an alternative way to conventionalmethods of monitoring students' language progress and performance.In order to achieve the goal of what we have just mentioned, Chapter Four makesa detailed elaboration on the corresponding principles of Formative Assessment,including the Principle of Equality, Practicality, Grading, Flexibility and PromotingStudents' Capability. At the same time, several familiar methods of FormativeAssessment are listed here. For example, Classroom Assessment, PortfolioAssessment, Diary and Journal, English Skills Formative Assessment List and so on.In addition, the limitation of Formative Assessment is also explained as well as itsvalue.In Chapter 5, an experiment is designed to verify the effectiveness of FormativeAssessment. There are four classes take part in this experiment. They are divided intoexperimental classes and controlled classes by random. Experimental classes areassessed by Formative Assessment mode. Of course, standardized tests cannot beabandoned. At the tests of midterm and final, Formative Assessment and SummativeAssessment should assess students at the same time. Summative Assessment onlyassesses controlled classes as usual. Through the results of the Formative Assessmentexperiment, we got the conclusion that Formative Assessment can be applied inmiddle school effectively. It can arouse students' learning interests, and promote theirintegrated language capability;it also breaks a new path for teacher's reflection oftheir teaching.It is expected that the findings of the current study will bring some innovativeideas to the reform of assessment in the setting of Chinese English teaching.