On The Application Of Formative Assessment In Senior High School English Teaching

With the implementation of the new curriculum reform in our country, assessment ofteaching has caused wide public concern. However, summative assessment is still dominant inthe assessment of English teaching at present in Chinese senior high schools largely due to theinfluence of traditional philosophy on education and talents. Students are judged through theirtest scores while their learning process, attitudes, values and abilities are usually ignored. It isgenerally realized that, in addition to summative assessment, education assessment shouldalso include formative assessment, which attaches great importance to the learning process.The National English Curriculum for Senior High Schools also accentuates that assessment bean important part of classroom English teaching and that formative assessment be included inthe whole assessment system. Multiple assessment system that combines formativeassessment with summative assessment becomes the goal of new curriculum reform. Thisresearch therefore tries to explore effective ways to the implementation of formativeassessment in senior high school English classroom teaching in order to provide somebeneficial reference for the teachers concerned with the hope that it will help promote Englishclassroom assessment reform in senior high schools.Based on relevant domestic and foreign researches on formative assessment, this studyintroduces formative assessment into the senior high school English teaching and learning.First of all, questionnaires were sent out and pretest was conducted so as to preliminarilyunderstand the students’ English learning. Next, three basic formative assessment methods---classroom observation, portfolios and interviews were adopted in English classroom for atentative exploration of effective formative assessment mode. Then, after the experiment, thestudy analyzed the students’ changes after the experiment based on information from thesecond questionnaires and latter test. Finally, the study summarized the research findings andexpounded the enlightenment of the research for senior high school English teaching.The result of the study indicates that as is seen from the research, formative assessmentcan greatly enhance the students’ interest and motivation in English learning. Besides, thestudy shows that formative assessment can to some extent help improve the students’academic performance. Finally, the study also indicates that the implementation of formativeassessment can considerably improve the relationship between teachers and students and therelationship among students. In addition to advantages, this research also manifests that thereare some problems in the application of formative assessment in senior high school Englishteaching: on the one hand, the result is not so good as expected in the aspects of students’using proper learning strategies and developing their autonomous learning of English; on theother hand, as is seen from this investigation, the students of the key classes benefit more from the formative assessment than that of the ordinary classes in the same high school.