Astudy On The Effectiveness Of Self-assessment On Middle School Students’ Writing Competence

It is undeniably believed that writing is a communication skill and a techniqueasset in the process of learning a language. However, this skill has been allotted theleast attention due to its complexity. Since the1970s, studies present writing as a“recursive, nonlinear cognitive process in which the writer moves back and forthbetween prewriting, writing, revising, and editing until he/she is satisfied with his/hercreation”. Being one of the most essential parts of English teaching, English writingin middle schools is known as the most painstaking part for both learners andinstructors. It is also known that in our country, the overall level of middle schoolstudents’ English writing proficiency has not reached a high standard. There is nodoubt that changing such a situation has been perplexing teachers and researchers.Nevertheless, many teachers and learners still see foreign language writing as anexercise in perfecting grammar and vocabulary. Plenty of researchers strongly holdthe view that writing in foreign or second language courses traditionally consists offill-in-the-blank workbook exercises and occasional descriptive essays about personaltopics such as friends, family, and vacations. In these writing tasks, the focus isusually on surface feature accuracy rather than on the development, organization, andeffective expression of the students’ own thoughts or ideas. Scholars also havestressed the importance of students’ perceived need to obtain corrections from theinstructor.Most students expect and value the feedbacks they receive in writing, andresearch has shown that there seems to be a connection between active correction oferrors and improvement in writing skills. However, over the years, correction ofwritten production has provoked some controversy. Several studies endorse differingapproaches to written correction, which can be separated into two main categories:(a)explicit (direct): the instructor indicates the error and provides the correct form and (b)non-explicit (indirect): the instructor marks the error in some fashion (underlined,highlighted, coded, etc.) and the student has to decide the correction. Unfortunately,those two ways to assess students’ writings fail to involve students into the assessingprocess.Tactics that concentrate on offering high quality educational feedbacks tolearners on their learning outcomes and products have aroused researchers’ interest and enthusiasm over the past few decades. Besides, engaging students into a moreopen and active learning atmosphere and encouraging them to play a more active rolein the management of their own study have already become hot issues(Butler&Winnie,1995). Those developments have been taking place across theeducational spectrum from primary to higher and even professional education. Thishas led to renewed passion and interest in the idea of self-assessment, which focuseson the improvement of learning rather than on the judging of final achievements.Clearly, over the decades, nearly all major studies of student assessment havefocused on the role of standardized tests in the education process. Up to today, withthe intensive development of our society, drawbacks of the enforcement ofeducational assessment in our country have emerged day by day. The dominantassessment currently remains tutor-led rather than learner-centered. Theteacher-centered dominance applies to both summative assessment and formativeassessment. However, there is an emerging recognition of the advantages and benefitsrelating to the application of alternative assessment methods that will transfer aproportion of the responsibility for assessment to the students through the applicationof self-assessment.One of the outstanding features of studies of assessment has been the shift in thefocus of attention, towards greater interest in the interactions between assessment andclassroom learning and away from concentration on the properties of restricted formsof test which are only weakly linked to the learning experiences of students. This shifthas been coupled with many expressions of hope that improvement in classroomassessment will make a strong contribution to the improvement of learning.Enlightened by all the studies conducted by other scholars, this thesis attempts toexplore the influences of the practice of self-assessment on the learners’ writingcompetence through implementing an experiment on students from two classes of asenior high school, Grade One. This experiment is implemented under the guidance ofmany theoretical supports, which include Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory,constructivism and the output hypothesis. Methodologies used in this study consist ofquestionnaire, and interview. This paper spares no efforts to investigate thoseconsequential questions: first of all, what effects does self-assessment have onameliorating middle school students’ writing skills? Second, what factors can affectthe implementation of self-assessment? Third, what are the effective measurements toimplement self-assessment? This paper is mainly divided into five sections. The firstsection is the introduction of this thesis. In this part, the research background and the significance of this study will be clarified. The second section is literature review, inwhich studies and theories related to this thesis will be introduced. The third partcontains the methodology of this paper. The following section shows us the analysisof data. The last section is the conclusion.