The Application Of Formative Assessment In English Writing Teaching For Senior High School Students

The reform of the Educational Assessment is an important part of the Elementary EducationCurriculum Reform. English writing is considered to be important in High School Englishteaching. The current assessment in English writing is the traditional assessment methods that theteacher assesses the students’ writing and the students do not take part in the assessing activity.Thus this cannot embody the spirit of the New Curriculum Reform. The suggestion toAssessment on the High School English Curriculum Standard is the combination of FormativeAssessment and Summative Assessment. And the former assessing method should be the primary.In order to be fit for the English Curriculum Standard, the Formative Assessment is applied inthe High School English writing in this thesis. There are two main research questions in thethesis. The first one is whether the Formative Assessment can help arouse the English writinginterests of the high school students. The second one is whether the Formative Assessment canimprove their English writing.After the literature review of the Formative Assessment in the foreign research and the homeresearch, the Research Methods are stated. In this research, the subjects are85students of twoclasses from one Senior High School in Jining City, Shandong Province. One class is theexperimental class, in which the Formative Assessment in English writing is applied. The otherclass is the control class, in which the traditional assessment is used in English writing. Theresearch instruments are writing tests and questionnaires. The statistic software SPSS17.0is usedto process the data in this research.Before the experiment, a writing test is taken out in the two classes, and the data of theirscores prove that there are no significant differences between them. The questionnaires which areused to investigate the experimental class are done before the experiment, too. In theexperimental class, the student self-assessment, peer-assessment and teacher-assessment areapplied in the students’ writing assessing process. The three different kinds of assessing tablesare used in each writing task, which are self-assessment table, peer-assessment table andteacher-assessment table. Thus the students can take part in the assessing activity and reflecttheir writing. After the experiment, the post-test of English writing is taken out in the two classes,and the post-questionnaires that are used to investigate the experimental class are done.The study proves that the Formative Assessment has a positive effect on students’ writing.After fifteen weeks’ experiment, the students of the experiment class, in which the FormativeAssessment is applied, have a significant improvement in their English writing, and also havemore interests in writing. So, it proves that the two hypotheses in this study are true, i.e., theFormative Assessment can help arouse the English writing interests of the high school students, and the Formative Assessment can improve their English writing. In the assessment example part,some assessing suggestions are given. It is hoped that these suggestions will help the teachers intheir English writing teaching. With the application of the Formative Assessment, both theteacher and the students can reflect to the teaching activity or the learning activity. TheFormative Assessment can help to improve the teacher’s teaching activities and to improve thestudents’ learning.