The Research Of Formative Assessment Applied To English Vocabulary Learning In Senior High School

Formative assessment plays an important role in language teaching. It involvesstudents in processes of learning and teaching and fosters students’ independence,autonomy, confidence as well as abilities for learning of the whole life. However, thetraditional standardized tests are used popularly in China as the means of assessmentin education.Theories of evaluation had not been introduced to China from foreign countriesuntil the1980s. The studies of formative assessment just began in recent years, andnowadays it has received increasing attentions in the area of language teaching andlearning. There have been many researches on formative assessment, but comparedwith the studies in the foreign countries, the development of researches on the subjectin China is still at its elementary stage and has a long way to go. Most studies in ourcountry are theoretical discussion, and few of them are empirical studies.Vocabulary learning is the base of second language acquisition. Vocabularyshould be the central part of language teaching (Lewis,1993). There are manyresearches on vocabulary with different focuses, such as second language vocabularyacquisition, vocabulary teaching techniques and methods, vocabulary learningstrategy and mental lexicon etc. But researches on relationship between languagelearning (esp., vocabulary learning) and formative assessment are few (Huang,2002;Guo&Yang,2003; Wang&Xie,2004). The present research explores the effects offormative assessment on English vocabulary learning of senior high school students.This research is an experimental study. The subjects are senior high schoolstudents, one control group and one experiment group. Before the experiment, the twogroups are required to finish a pretest of vocabulary, and the data are processed andanalyzed by the statistic software SPSS17.0. The results show that there is nosignificant difference between the two groups in English vocabulary level. Formativeassessment is implemented in the experiment group, while the traditional assessment is used in the control group. The experiment group participates various formativeassessment activities, such as group discussions, self-assessment, peer-assessment andfeedback from the teacher, etc. The observations and portfolios were also conductedin the experiment group. After the experiment, the two groups take part in the sameposttest of vocabulary. Independent sample t-test and paired samples t-test are used toanalyze the data. The results show that students’ vocabulary level in both groups hasbeen improved, but the progress made by students in the experiment group is muchbigger than that of control group. Two questionnaires are employed at the beginningas well as at the end of the experiment, combined with observation, portfolios andinterview. The experiment aims to see the effects of formative assessment on students’learning autonomy, interest and motivation in vocabulary learning as well as theiropinions toward formative assessment in classroom. From all the results it can be seenthat the formative assessment is effective to enhance students’ vocabulary learning. Itfacilitates the development of learning autonomy, motivation and confidence. Besides,most students hold positive opinions toward formative assessment and they believethat formative assessment is useful for vocabulary teaching and learning.The present research applies formative assessment in English vocabularylearning of senior high school students. It sheds light on the studies of implementingformative assessment in English teaching.