A Study On The Washback Of Formative Assessment On English Writing Teaching And Learning Of Senior High School

English Writing Test has a proper proportion in NEMT, CET4-6and TEM4-8ofnational English tests, especially in NEMT whose scores are almost accounted for20%. However, our senior high school students’ writing ability has always been at theweakest point among listening, speaking, reading, writing of four abilities. Therefore,how to improve students’ writing ability or writing level has become the problem thatneeds to solve urgently at present. But the traditional assessment methods, asummative assessment, can not evaluate students’ writing ability or improve students’writing level properly. Then, formative assessment has a certain referentialsignificance for the solution to this problem. Currently, lots of researches of thewashback of English writing test have been done, but there are little about the studiesof the washback of formative assessment on English writing test of senior highschool.This study makes a preliminary investigation into the influences of formativeassessment on English writing teaching and learning of senior high school, and mangeto investigate the positive and negative washback of formative assessment on Englishwriting learning of students in senior high school, and attitude of the teachers andstudents towards formative assessment.The participants of this study involved5English teachers and100students oftwo classes of Grade1from NO.2High School of Longkou city who were conductedsix-week writing experiment. The students were required to take a pretest and posttestwriting paper at the beginning and the end of the experiment. And two questionnaireswere conducted to investigate students’ attitude towards English writing before andafter the experiment so as to make a conclusion through contrast analysis. Andinterview and classroom observation were taken as the instruments to make awashback investigation. Descriptive statistics was also used to analyze the data.The findings of this study shows that there existed both positive and negativewashback on English writing learning, and the positive washback is more than thenegative one which influence formative assessment on improving students’ writinglevel, ability and contents of English writing. In addition, some teachers and students show the positive attitude towards the applications of formative assessment onEnglish writing. However, some of teachers and students thought that it was wastetime to do the self and peer assessment after completing the writing tasks, especiallyfor the students who considered time as their lives. Therefore, the questions we shouldresearch in the future are how to make formative assessment apply to English writingin the stage of senior high school in order to improve students’ writing ability andlevel better.