Under The New Curriculum Middle School English Formative Evaluation Study

With the progressing of curriculum reform, evaluation has attracted wide attention and is becoming more and more important. It has been a long time during which summative evaluation is the major means of teaching evaluation and marks in exams are considered as the only standard to evaluate and select the students. English teaching is no exception, of course. The traditional ways of summative evaluation overemphasize the importance of marks, while overlooking the evaluation of the students' initiative and creativeness reflected in their study, thus discouraging their activeness and even making them totally lose their interest in learning English. Therefore, it's a great necessity to build and consummate a scientific and efficient system of evaluation to help the students develop themselves fully and healthily.This thesis describes the definitions of formative evaluation and its major characteristics to make it understood much more clearly under the background of the new standards of curriculum. It also provides an overview of the historical and contemporary issues related to formative evaluation at home and abroad and shows the general differences between formative evaluation and summative evaluation. Besides, this thesis discusses the great necessity and urgency of application of formative evaluation in curriculum reform according to the new standards of curriculum. What's more important is that this thesis attempts to raise the goals of applying formative evaluation in real English teaching activities, puts forward several hypothesis concerning the effects of formative evaluation on English learning and designs the formative evaluation tools including portfolios and actually carries out the experiment in real teaching activities.Through the experiment, after applying the formative evaluation in English learning, the hypothesis have been verified:In the process of English learning, formative evaluation is much more effective than traditional summative evaluation to aid the students to master meta-cognitive strategies; cultivate and strengthen their motivation; facilitate to help them form active affects and attitudes towards English and improve their English achievement. Also some valuable enlightments can be obtained:scientific and efficient application of formative evaluation can not only promote students' acquisition of language knowledge, but also stimulate their activeness and initiative in study, improve their abilities of applying language skills and cultivate their cooperation spirits and autonomic learning ability. In the meanwhile, it can help teachers know more about formative evaluation and develop the habit of timely reflection for their teaching to improve their teaching capabilities and professional skills.However, in the whole process of experiment, there are still lots of problems to indicate the shortages and disadvantages of formative evaluation, such as time-consuming, strong subjectivity. It means the experiments in the future should be more meticulous to further probe into the scientific and efficient application of formative evaluation according to the requirements of the new standards of curriculum.