The Application Of Formative Assessment To English Teaching At Junior Middle Schools

Educational assessment plays the role of guiding, monitoring and adjusting instructions to guarantee the attainment of curriculum objectives. Assessment can be classified into summative assessment and formative assessment based on the different purposes, functions, and methods. Summative assessment focuses on the results for the purpose of grading, election, and placement. This single-dimension assessment fails to cultivate learners' positive affect, initiative, and learning autonomy. In contrast, formative assessment takes place during instruction on a day-to-day basis for the purpose of adjustment, modification, and improvement. Nowadays, formative assessment has drawn more and more attention.The New English Curriculum Criteria (NECC) defines the assessment requirements, which points out that summative assessment should combine with formative assessment. Unfortunately, although the idea of using formative assessment has been advocated, formative assessment is seldom adopted by teachers during their instruction. Additionally, comprehensive and systematic studies on the specific application of formative assessment are amorphous and a proper assessment model hasn't been established so far. Therefore, applying formative assessment in teaching practice to testify the influence and explore a practical model is badly necessary.Focusing on the attempt of putting the theory into effect, this thesis is indented to apply theories and practices of formative assessment to English teaching at junior middle schools. The purpose of the study is to determine the influence of formative assessment on students' affect, learning autonomy and English achievement. Meanwhile, it supposes to discover the feasibility of formative assessment methods, and hopefully supply an applicable model for other teachers. This will be much helpful to enrich assessment theories and provides assessment techniques to English assessment.The study was carried out as an experimental one and lasted for an academic year. The subjects were 102 students from two classes in a junior middle school. During the experiment, various fomative assessment methods were applied in the experimental class to assess students' language skills, language knowledge, affect, learning strategies and cultural awareness. The experimental results proved that formative assessment could facilitate learners to form positive affect, more effective to promote learning autonomy and more effective to improve English achievement. Meanwhile, the feasibility of applying formative assessment was justified. Finally, the limitations of the study were discussed from the aspects of formative assessment itself and the study design. And suggestions were given to other teachers for future practice.