A Study Of The Effects Of Formative Assessment On Students’ English Learning Strategies In Senior High School

Formative assessment and language learning strategies are two very important components in English curriculum objectives. The effective formative assessment, providing opportunities for students to constantly experience progress and success, to reflect on their learning, to build up their self-confidence, to regulate their language learning strategies and thus advancing students’comprehensive language competencies, is an important factor to promote English teaching and learning in senior school. Language learning strategies, which include four categories of strategies, namely cognitive strategies, meta-cognitive strategies, communicative strategies and resource strategies (New English Curriculum Standards,2003), equipping students with "techniques"(Chamot&Kupper,1989) or "tactics"(Morley,1993) to "facilitate their acquisition, storage, retrieval and use of second language"(Oxford,1989), is a significant guarantee of the development of students’comprehensive language competencies, as is fully indicated in the old saying that "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach him how to fish and he eats for a lifetime". Many existing researches show that formative assessment has a certain degree of effects on students’language learning strategies. However, relevant empirical researches based on senior high school are not easily available, by which the author is driven to explore in this field. Taking the realistic characteristics of English teaching situation and students’English learning of Wuli Senior High School, Hanbin District in Ankang of Shaanxi Province into consideration, the research aims to reveal the effects of formative assessment on students’language learning strategies in English in Senior High School.The research was carried out from September,2011to February,2012, with selecting76subjects who came from two classes in Senior1in their first semester in the school for comparison. Of the two classes, Class9is the control class with39students, while in the treatment class, Class10, there are37students. The age and gender of the subjects between the two classes are relatively equal. Moreover, all the subjects are under the instruction of the same teacher with the same textbook. SPSS16.0was used to analyze and examine all the statistic data gathered with the questionnaire as well as the pre-test and post-test in the whole process of the experiment, including independent samples T-test and paired samples T-test of students’academic achievements and Chi-square test for the same questionnaire on students’language learning strategies, the results of which indicated that before the experiment indicated that students’academic achievement and their use of language learning strategies are at the same level between the two classes. In the experiment, the traditional summative assessment is still the only dominant regime used in the control class, while formative assessment is put on the centre in the treatment class. After the experiment, both the academic achievements and the adoption of language learning strategies in the treatment class were significantly improved, while in the control class, there was no significant difference existing before and after the experiment.Since the only difference between the two classes is whether formative assessment was employed, an empirical conclusion can be reached that formative assessment is more beneficial to the promotion of students’English language learning strategies in senior high school and among the four categories of language learning strategies, meta-cognitive strategies are more influenced by formative assessment, followed by cognitive strategies and then communicative strategies. However, there is no significant difference in the use of resource strategies. Meanwhile, the improvement on the adoption of language learning strategies further results in the improvement of students’ academic achievement. As a more significantly improved category of strategies, meta-cognitive strategies do contribute to students’English academic achievement.However, the research is only a case study because of the limited number and the range of the subjects, and the short time span in the experiment. Besides, as the result of the guidance of NMET for Shaanxi, both the pre-test and post-test mainly centre on students’reading and writing skills rather than listening and speaking. The future research in this field should take all of these limitations into consideration.