An Empirical Study Of Module-Based Formative Assessments In Primary School English Teaching

This thesis studies the formative assessment based on the teaching module in primary school English teaching. The Standard of the New English curriculum advocates’Process-based Development’ evaluation mechanism. It emphasis the combination of formative assessment with summative assessment, noting in particular at the primary stage, formative evaluation should mainly be used. Currently, the research on formative evaluation has achieved a lot at home and abroad, however there is litter research about primary English formative evaluation. As an English teacher long engaged in primary school English teaching, the author feels the necessity to establish a set of effective methods for formative assessment. So the author learns from research results of the existing formative evaluation and designs a set of formative evaluation implementations according to the module characteristics of primary school English teaching. And an experimental study was carried out for about one year aiming to answer the following two questions:1)How can these module-based formative evaluation implementations improve student interest in learning?2)How can it help improve students’ listening, speaking, reading and writing skills of English?This study is mainly based on the humanism education theory and students-centered. It combines teachers’ evaluation, self-evaluation, group evaluation and parents’ evaluation. These module-based formative evaluations focus on students’emotion and interest besides students’ knowledge and skill. At the first,58students in the experimental class were divided into group A (excellent), group B (good) and group C (Qualified) based on the results of exam. After one year experiments, the author uses frequency statistics to analyze the related data of the three groups obtained before and after the experiment and make a comparison. The experiment is carried out by means of a questionnaire, portfolios, tests and dialogue journals. The students’interest in English-learning is analyzed by combining the questionnaire data of before-and-after the experiment and the numbers of listening, speaking English in each module. The improvement of students’ability in listening, speaking, reading and writing English is illustrated with listening scores of the three unified exams, combining with the results of oral tests, and students’ evaluation results of reading and writing in each module.Our study has shown these findings:1).Module-based formative evaluation can raise students’ interest in learning significantly (especially the students of group C).2). Module-based formative evaluation can improve students’ listening, speaking, reading and writing skills, especially listening and reading skills,(the English level in the students of group B is improved obviously).3). Module-based formative evaluation can enhance parents’ attention to the students’learning.This study has certain limitations because of time limit. The author thinks that a longer time experiment shall be carried out. Module-based formative evaluation requires for further revision especially in terms of oral evaluation and listening evaluation.