A Case Study Of The Effects Of Formative Assessment On English Listening Comprehension

Assessment is a vital part of course instruction. It is divided as summative assessment and formative assessment according to the functions in the process of instruction. In recent years, formative assessment has become a popular topic in foreign language teaching and researches. But most researchers try to explore the related theoretical studies, rather than the experimental study. Through a case study, this thesis explores the effects of formative assessment on the participants' listening comprehension and their listening strategies. It is expected that the present study will contribute to the research on formative assessment in general, and to the application of formative assessment to College English teaching in China in particular. The present researcher made and verified the two hypotheses as follows:1. Formative assessment as a major integration with summative assessment in EFL class is more effective than summative assessment alone applied in improving non-English major college students' listening comprehension.2. Formative assessment can exert a positive effect on the development of non-English major college students'listening strategies.The experiment took 88 first-year non-English major college students from two classes as the participants at Soochow University. One was treated as the experimental group (EG, hereafter) and the other was the controlled group (CG, hereafter). At the beginning of the experiment, the two classes were given a questionnaire and a listening test, the results of which were processed and analyzed with Oxford's model and SPSS13.0 and showed no significant difference between the two classes in listening comprehension and the use of listening strategies. Then formative assessment was implemented in EG, in which formative assessment would constitute 60% of the full score and the final examination would account for the other 40%, while the controlled group just took 20% for comprehensive performance and 80% for the final examination. During the experiment, portfolios writing and three quizzes were adopted in EG. After the four-month experiment, both CG and EG were given a posttest in listening comprehension and a questionnaire. The major findings are summarized as follows:1. Formative assessment is more effective than summative assessment in improving non-English major college students' listening comprehension. The standard deviation of the posttest score of the experimental group is 2.79, which is 0.4 smaller than that of the pretest. It is a pleasure to find that the standard deviation of the experimental group is smaller, which means the differences among the students are getting smaller and indicates that formative assessment can enable lower level students to make more improvement.2. Formative assessment can help non-English major college students to develop listening strategies. In EG, the students in general employed listening strategies at a high frequency level, while in CG, it was still at a medium frequency level. It is discovered that after the experiment metacognitive strategies were used most frequently by the participants in EG, followed by cognitive strategies, and social/ affective strategies came as the least in listening comprehension.The findings of the experiment suggest that teachers should integrate formative assessment with summative assessment in college English class and adopt various modes of formative assessment in the process of instruction to promote non-English major college students' learning, such as self-assessment, peer assessment and teacher assessment.