Study On Improving English Teaching In An Independent College With The Backwash Effect Of English Assessments

Language testing has backwash effect on language teaching and the backwash can bepositive or passive. The positive effect that language testing has on the teaching is positivebackwash effect and the passive effect that language testing has on the teaching is passivebackwash effect.At present, English class, as the required subject, has to go on for at least two years indomestic universities and colleges and the students have to take various English assessmentssuch as the mid-term and final examinations, College English Test Band Four and Six, andin-class quiz and oral English tests. These English Assessments play a really important role inEnglish teaching and the backwash effect cannot be ignored.In this thesis, the writer first conducts a survey by delivering 500 questionnaires among thestudents in independent college to learn about the attitudes of the students toward variousEnglish assessments. Through the survey the author tries to find out the problems existing indesigning examination papers to improve the testing forms to develop the positive backwasheffect and improve students’learning autonomy at last.After finishing the survey, the author chooses two parallel teaching classes: class 5 and 6 ascontrol group, class 7 and 8 as the experimental group, majoring in Machine Design,Manufacturing, and Automation, grade 2009 in Liren College, for a two-semester experiment toobserve the similarities and differences of two groups in classroom performance, learningmotivation and learning results. An empirical experiment was carried out in the thesis to compareand observe the influence that different testing contents and forms have on language learning.The two teaching classes are assigned to take one final examination each semester and the authoradds four classroom English assessments for control group and experimental group. Theproportion of objective items and subjective items is 7:3 in the traditional tests for the controlgroup and 4.5:5.5 in the new tests for experimental group.Independent Samples T Test and Paired Samples T Test are used to analyze and compare theresults of two groups in two different semesters. Through the comparison between the quotas ofthe two teaching classes’final results and observing the changes of students’attitudes towardEnglish learning, we could conclude that if we want maximize the positive backwash effect of testing and improve the English teaching quality and students’learning autonomy we shouldactively take advantage of the English assessments. However, many universities and collegeshave paid too much attention to the result of one exam and neglect the feedback information thatthe backwash effect of the English assessment brings to English teaching and learning. What ismore, reasonable assessments can improve teaching quality and students’autonomous learningability. On the basis of the existing problems in English testing, this thesis compares andanalyzes the influences that the positive and negative backwash effects have on teachers andstudents to propose several measures to maximize the positive backwash effect to improve thequality of English teaching in independent college.