The Application Of Formative Assessment In University Oral English Teaching

According to different functions and purposes, there are generally two kinds of educational assessment—summative assessment and formative assessment. As a traditional assessment, summative assessment, which has a lot of disadvantages, has been playing a leading role in China for a long time.Though some successful researches and experiments of integrating formative assessment with teaching have been carried out in primary and high schools, rarely have those researches been conducted in universities and colleges. Thus, the author attempts to make a research on the use of formative assessment in university oral English teaching.In this research, two classes of non-English majors were chosen from Huaiyin Normal University, one experimental class (EC) and one control class (CC) with about52students each. Both classes were at the same level and had the same course of College Oral English; formative assessment of oral English teaching was adopted in the EG while traditional oral English teaching was adopted in the CG. The experiment was conducted for a semester. Many approaches like self-assessment, peer-assessment and teacher-assessment, and kinds of tools were employed in the EC, such as questionnaires, observations, dialogue journals, interviews and so on. After the research, based on the result, the author made a comparison between the EC and the CC.The result indicates that students in EC became more passionate and confident in English speaking than before, and they have increased the cooperative awareness to some extent. And the formative assessment has also guided teachers to find better solutions to enhance the teaching effect.