| In order to take advantages of the students’ subjective initiative, and avoid the largeproportion held by teachers’ impression in deciding the score of oral English test,self-assessment was introduced to classroom practice. Many scholars home and abroadsuch as Laing&Kamhi (2003)，Chauncey (2004) increasingly emphasize on theapplication of students’ self assessment in teaching, and constantly provide boththeoretical and practical evidence. They agreed that student self-assessment played a veryimportant role in the process of teaching and learning, and they mentioned manydisciplines, but provided no evidence of its effectiveness on students’ EFL learning,especially in the specific environment of mainland China. The Chinese culture has beenlong regarded as an obstacle to oral English learning. In this sense, a scientific andoperable experiment of self-assessment on students’ oral English learning in mainlandChina may provide some useful evidence, thus, the study on this topic became essentialand greatly needed.It was based on three theories: constructivism, the learner autonomy, and the notionof lifelong learning. It also explored the empirical studies related to self-assessment, andthe experimental design partially followed Chen (2008).The purposes of this study is to explore the maneuverability of studentself-assessment in oral English teaching based on the real situation of non-English majors,to provide experimental evidence that the training of student self-assessment in oralEnglish is feasible in college oral English teaching in China, to confirm the hypothesis thatthe training of student self-assessment in oral English can not only help students improvetheir competence of spoken English, but also help them promote their other linguisticskills. In addition, the accuracy of student self-assessment and the cultural influence onself-assessment training were both mentioned as research questions.It was basically a quasi-experimental research, and composed both quantitative andqualitative research methods. Instruments used in the research include choosing topics forpresentation, a written questionnaire, a pre-test and a post-test (both oral tests and thecomprehensive tests) as well as group interview. The software Statistical Package for Social Sciences13.0has also been used. The experiment was conducted in two intactclasses of freshmen at Liren College, a secondary college of Yanshan University, and thetwo groups were taught by the author herself.The study showed that the experimental group made significant improvement inassessment accuracy, and confirmed that students could learn how to self-assess throughpractice. The difference between the oral pre-test and post-test of the experimental groupis statistically significant, which somewhat support the research hypothesis that thesemeasures taken in the research could arouse students’ oral English learning interests, andimprove their competence of oral English. In addition, the traditional Chinese culturewhich was seen as an obstacle to autonomous learning did not show negative influence onself-assessment in this experiment. However, the results of the present study somewhatrejected the research hypothesis that practice of self-assessment in oral English can helpimprove student other linguistic skills which were tested by the post comprehensive test,and whether there was a positive influence of traditional culture on student self-assessmenthas not been proved.The findings might be helpful to both EFL teachers and students. Teachers who areinterested in improving students’ oral English ability might use the experiment design tofacilitate their classroom teaching, and students may use self-assessment as anautonomous learning tool. The author also hopes that this paper can draw more attentionof the experts in EFL teaching and some school authorities, so that self-assessment couldbe more popularized in the educational system in China, and thus the informationcollected in this research could provide some inspiration or reference to some futureresearch. |
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