A Study Of Washback Of Formative Assessment On English Writing Motivation And Strategy Of Senior High School Students

Formative assessment, which focuses on the improvement of teaching and learningrather than on the judging of final achievement, receives great attention in the educationalfield. However, there has been little research into formative assessment on the Englishwriting of senior high school students in China so far, where the timed impromptu essay testsare dominant and the formative assessment practices such as portfolio assessment, peer andself-assessment are not popular. So the present study focuses on exploring the washback offormative assessment on English writing motivation and strategy of senior high schoolstudents.The participants involved in this study include100students and their English teacherfrom Laixi No.One Senior High school. The students come from two classes of Grade One,one used as the experimental group and the other used as the control group. And the researchinstruments include questionnaires and interviews. The research data were analyzed by thesoftware SPSS through independent samples t-tests and paired samples t-tests.The study has two major findings:1) the washback of formative assessment on Englishwriting motivation of senior high school students is positive. Formative assessment canstrengthen senior high school students’ English writing motivation. And the washback effecton every component of English writing motivation is positive;2) the washback of formativeassessment on English writing strategy of senior high school students is also positive.Formative assessment can promote students’ use of writing strategy. And the washback effecton every component of English writing strategy is positive.