An Empirical Study Of Formative Assessment On Reducing English Writing Anxiety Of Senior Middle School Students

Writing is a form of communication to express one's thinking. Teaching students to write fluently in English is one of the top objectives of English teaching in the 21^st century.Writing ability is regarded as a symbol of students' English level.In the traditional writing assessment, the teachers are accustomed to relying on summative assessment,which is to judge a piece of writing by scores simply and they are likely to pay little attention to the students' emotions,learning attitudes,learning activities,learning strategies and students' efforts as well as the problems students met in the writing.Meanwhile students pay very little attention to the reviews from teachers.The students do not know how to improve their writing completely and most students become very passive and inactive in writing.As English teachers,we should seek as many kinds of ways as possible to reduce students' writing anxiety as well as to improve the writing ability of the students.Up to this present time,more and more researches have been conducted and many statements have been made on the teaching of writing.The idea of formative assessment was put forward,and it has been gradually accepted by most of the teachers. Many experts believe that formative assessment plays an important role in the evaluation of English writing.The study reported in this thesis is from the concern of the author as a teacher about students' writing anxiety in English writing.The author takes "An Empirical Study of Formative Assessment on Reducing English Writing Anxiety of Senior Middle School Students" as the title and takes an interest in how formative assessment on students' writing reduces students' writing anxiety and how the two factors influence students' writing performance.The study is based on several important theories,such as the second language acquisition,Krashen's Filter Hypothesis,Humanistic Theory and Constructivism Theory.Based on the theoretical and literature review,an experiment is designed to study whether the formative assessment on students' writing can reduce their writing anxiety and to probe the relationship between formative assessment and their writing performance.The experiment study lasted one semester and was divided into three steps:data collection,data selection and data analysis.The participants involve a teacher and 2 arts classes,totaling 108 students.Data are collected and analyzed by using questionnaires, Microsoft Excel,T-test for equality means in Microsoft Excel,and computer assistant design system.The results can clearly illustrate that the formative assessment on students can reduce their writing anxiety and improve students' writing performances.The thesis contains six parts.Part 1 introduces the research methods, the creativity and the significance of the thesis.Part 2 concerns the brief introduction and the relative definitions used in the study as well as the study abroad and in China.It is mainly a review of relative study results. Part 3 is theoretical background,paving the ground for the current study. Part 4 is the experiment.The author introduces the subjects,the purposes, the hypotheses of the empirical study,the instruments and ways as well as the procedures used in the study.Part 5 is data collected and analyzed. The last part is the conclusion.It concerns with the major findings, limitations of the present study and suggestions for the further research.