A Study And Practice Of Formative Assessment For English Majors In Higher Vocational English Teaching

Formative assessment, as one of the forms of modern educational assessment, has played an important role in the field of English teaching and established enormous positive influences. Therefore, many experts and educators at home and abroad have been engaged in the theoretical and experimental studies about formative assessment to explore and boost its applications in teaching practice. Related studies reveal that application and implementation of formative assessment can help students adjust their learning strategies, strengthen their autonomous learning and thus, promote their learning efficiency.Under this background, on the basis of practice of formative assessment in English classes in a higher vocational college, this study attempts to find out whether application of formative assessment could help students develop their autonomous learning, competences, team work, and so on, so as to highlight students’overall study. To be specific, this study focuses on the following research questions:compared with traditional test-oriented summative assessment, whether formative assessment could promote students learning efficiency, especially for those with ordinary and slow English levels; whether formative assessment could better explore influential factors in students’learning such as learning interests, learning motivations, learning attitudes and learning behaviors.To identify the positive influences on English majors’learning in higher vocational colleges with formative assessment and to explore the key factors involved in effective formative assessment and potential problems met in practice, after consulting plenty of literatures, this study is based on experiments carried out among79English majors in Grade2010in a Higher Vocational College in the course of Situational Business English during a semester. Data is collected with instruments and techniques as tests, questionnaires, interviews, observations, and portfolios. Independent Sample t-test is employed in analyzing and comparing the data collected from experiments.The results show that formative assessment has positive influences upon higher vocational college English majors in their learning. By actively influencing factors in learning such as learning interests, learning motivations, learning attitudes, and learning behaviors, formative assessment could improve students’overall learning, especially for those ordinary and slow. On the contrary, traditional assessment has little in influences on improving students’learning. Furthermore, this study also points out pedagogical implications for the application of formative assessment in English teaching. However, there are some limitations and problems still existing in this study for future improvement.