Research Of The Ways To Improve College English Autonomous Learning By Formative Assessment

Since Holec brought autonomous learning into language teaching in 1981, scholars of many countries in the world began to value autonomous learning. Teaching Requirement for College English Curriculum(Curriculum Requirement) stresses that autonomous learning ability plays an important role in cultivation of students’ comprehensive quality and lifelong learning. Through studying the previous researches of the ways to foster autonomous learning, the author finds that many researchers discuss how to foster autonomous learning from the perspectives of learning styles, learning strategies, teaching modes and so on. Among these researches, some researchers try to start with the perspective of formative assessment. but the author finds that there are some problems existing in previous researches. Therefore, based on the previous researches, the author also wants to discuss how to foster the ability of autonomous learning.As one important assessment method of college English, formative assessment focuses on individuals’ learning process in order to make students monitor, assess and adjust their learning process,strategies, as well as achievements, and the like at any time. The ultimate purpose is to foster the students’ ability of life-long learning and learning independently. The value orientation of the two concepts are almost the same as far as this point. Moreover, Curriculum Requirement stresses that formative assessment can effectively monitor the process of students’ autonomous learning and it is a very important method to promote students’ learning. Therefore, there is feasibility of fostering the college students’ autonomous ability of learning English by formative assessment in theory.The author intends to adopt literature research method to find out the problems and misunderstandings existing in previous researches of using formative assessment to foster autonomous learning and tries to avoid the occurrence of these problems. The main research question of this thesis is that how to use four formative assessment tools(questions, anecdotal records, student portfolios and assessment checklist) to foster the five dimensions of autonomous learning ability: the ability of determining learning objectives, the ability of determining learning contents and progressions, the ability of selecting learning techniques, the ability of monitoring learning process and the ability evaluating learning achievements. The research shows that the method of assessment checklist and anecdotal records can help to foster the ability of determining learning objectives, the method of student portfolios and assessment checklist can help to foster the ability of determining learning contents and progressions, the method of raising questions and anecdotal records can help to foster the ability of selecting learning techniques, the method of anecdotal records can help to foster the ability of monitoring learning process, the method of anecdotal records can help to foster the ability of evaluating learning achievements. The thesis provides some ideas for other researchers studying how to foster autonomous learning ability and has some reference value.