The Application Of Formative Assessment To English Audio-visual-oral Teaching For English Majors

Formative assessment is a new assessment mode in the education assessment field.This method emphasizes the adjusting of the education process in order to ensure betterachievement of the education goal. In English teaching, it requires ongoing evaluation ofthe students’ study, not only assessment of the students knowledge, but also daily studyperformance, the achievements as well as the emotions, attitudes, learning strategies and soon.In recent years, more and more researches of formative assessment have been carriedout. The researches abroad focus mainly on the function, principles and instruments offormative assessment, while, the domestic researches are mainly on the application offormative assessment to college English teaching for non-English majors and middle schoolteaching, barely to teaching for English majors. Considering English audio-visual-oralteaching for English majors today mainly employ summative assessment, the studyattempts to apply formative assessment to English audio-visual-oral teaching for Englishmajors, trying to answer the following questions by teaching experiment:1) Will formativeassessment improve students’ attitudes and learning strategies of listening comprehensionand oral English study and develop students’ potential to be an autonomous learner?2) Willformative assessment enhance students’ listening and speaking ability?3) Will formativeassessment improve teacher’s teaching effect? Hence, the effectiveness of the application offormative assessment to English audio-visual-oral teaching for English majors can betestfied.By means of pre-questionnaire and pre-test, the author selected respectively28students from two parallel classes of English majors of2010in the foreign language schoolof Shandong University of Technology, and then conducted a teaching experiment lastingfor17weeks in the two classes (one is the experimental group, and the other the controlgroup). In the experimental group, formative assessment was used, while summativeassessment was used in the control group. After the experiment, a post-test,post-questionnaire and interview were carried out to prove whether the students’ learningattitudes, strategies and motivations have been changed or not. And the results of the pretest,the posttest and the questionnaires were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively by SPSS16.0The study findings are:1) Formative assessment can effectively improve students’attitudes, learning strategies and motivation in English listening and oral study, and helpstudents to form good study habits to become autonomous learners.2) Formativeassessment can largely enhance students’ listening and speaking ability.3) To a great extent,formative assessment can help the teacher to improve teaching efficiency and effects.According to the findings of the research, the author correspondingly put forwardsome suggestions on the application of formative assessment to English audio-visual-oralteaching for English majors, and pointed out the limitations of this research and suggestionsfor the future study.