The Research On The Application Of Formative Assessment In English Listening And Speaking For Junior High School

For long periods, summative assessment has been the main assessment methodin teaching assessment system in our country, and a student’s testing scores havebeen regarded as the final assessment criteria to group and select students. Englishteaching is no exception. So some students study English only to pass exams orproceed to higher schools. They focus on the memorizing language points butneglect the importance of improving the ability to use the language.Apparently, summative assessment over emphasizes the importance of scores,and ignores the evaluation on students’ creativity and subjectivity in the learningprocess, which will undermine students’ motivation to learning. Therefore, it’s badlynecessary to establish a new assessment system to promote constant developmentof students.Problems of the traditional assessment system lead to advocation of formativeassessment. It pays much attention to students’ attitude. Its purpose is to find outpotential talents of each student, improve students’ learning methods and providefeedback for teachers. According to the English Course Criteria，‘Teachers shouldpromote the combination of summative and formative assessments and attachimportance to the learning process as well as the final result. And assessment shouldbe primarily formative.’Listening and speaking ability is considered as the most important part in theEnglish teaching of Junior high school. However，both teachers and students seem tobe suffered a lot from teaching and learning. Most junior high school students,especially low-grade students, still find that it’s really difficult to communicate withothers in English though they have already been learning English listening andspeaking for quite a few years.This thesis attempts to expound how to apply formative assessment to juniorschool English listening and speaking teaching. This thesis consists of five chapter. InChapter1, it introduces research background of formative assessment and thepractical significance of the present research. Chapter2introduce terms and concepts concerning assessment, it also compare formative assessment withsummative assessment. After that, it illuminates characteristics of formativeassessment. Then it provides an overview of the historical and contemporary issuesrelated to educational assessment at home and abroad. The last part of this chapteris mainly about theories related to formative assessment. In Chapter3, the authorexplores how to carry out formative assessment in Junior School English teaching bymeans of experimental research. This chapter includes the principles, ways, tools andcontents of formative assessment. Chapter4analyzes the statistical results. Chapter5expounds the enlightenment of the research. It also presents the limitations andsuggests solutions to the problems in applying formative assessment.The experiment indicated that the teachers’ cognition towards the improvementof the students’ learning was from arbitrary and blurred to systematical and clearthrough recording and monitoring the formative evaluation data of the students, theteachers knew what the students need well and may think in teaching and create inthinking, so the teaching methods were pertinent to be chosen, the teaching becamelively, flexible and efficient, the ability to research has been improved as well. Itpromoted English teaching, the communication between the students and theteachers, and the personalities and all-round development of the students whichmeant teachers evaluate the students of all aspects.