A Study On The Application Of Formative Assessment To The College English Writing Teaching

With the proceeding of economic globalization, as an international language, English plays an overwhelming role in achieving the communication and idea exchange among people. The English writing is a skill of output, which can reflect one’s comprehensive cultural competence and logic thinking ability. There is no doubt that English writing is one skill which can be acquired only in a hard and long way among the four basic skills of English, that is, listening, speaking, reading and writing. As one means of expression, writing helps people to make a direct communication with each other without restriction of time and place, which can witness the lighting up the flame of thinking and penetrating ideas. In sharp contrast with the importance of English writing, students in the universities and colleges show an indifferent attitude towards English writing, mostly caused by the reason that the universities adapt the traditional English teaching method and evaluation.As for the college English writing teaching, the general pattern is that: teachers teach writing theories and techniques by analyzing writing models. Then students are required to write compositions about fixed topic. After finishing it, students hand on their compositions, which will be revised and evaluated by teachers. During the process of evaluation, teacher is the sole subject of evaluation. However, the present situation of students’ writing proficiency and their indifferent attitude might arouse doubt that: whether the traditional English writing teaching and evaluation can improve students’ writing proficiency and stimulate their writing interest or not? Whether we should combine new teaching ideas and evaluation into English writing teaching or not? The new curriculum standard promulgated by the Ministry of education in 2001 pointed out that evaluation system should reflect the pluralism of the subject of evaluation, and the diversity of evaluation methods. The evaluation should focus the process and result at a time, and attach equal importance to each. Correspondently, the emphasis of formative assessment was writing process, formative assessment also pays more attention to students’ performance, attitude and studying strategies which emerge during the writing process. And the subjects of formative assessment include teacher, peer and students themselves. We could find that the formative assessment can satisfy the requirement of the new curriculum reform. That is the reason why the author intends to apply the formative assessment into colleague English writing teaching.In order to investigate the influence of the application of Formative Assessment to the college English writing on students’ English writing proficiency, the author used a variety of research methods. Through literature survey, the development process, concept, classification, theoretical basis and current development status of domestic and foreign countries were investigated. And this paper made an analysis of college students’ writing emotional attitude change through questionnaire and interview. The students in the two natural classes who major in the mathematics and professional education in a College of Shan Dong Province, were respectively grouped into the experimental class and the control class to have writing teaching experiment for a semester. In the experimental class, the teacher adapted the formative assessment into writing teaching, using various evaluation scales and portfolio. In the control class, traditional teaching method and traditional assessment were still used. The data generated by the pre-test, the post test, and the questionnaire were analyzed by SPSS20.0 software. Then the result reflects that:(1) Formative assessment can improve students’ writing proficiency, which can be manifest to structure, content and language use;(2) Formative assessment has a positive effect on college students’ writing attitude. The students in the experimental class have more positive attitude towards writing, and reshape the writing confidence and self writing self-efficacy;(3) Formative assessment is helpful to improve the frequency of the use of English writing strategies, which is beneficial to the formation of good writing habit, which can also improve writing proficiency.Finally, the author proposed some corresponding suggestions on the combination of application of formative assessment into English writing teaching and traditional evaluation in order to apply the formative assessment into college English writing teaching in a more reasonable and scientific way, so we could take advantage of the formative assessment to the maximum extent, and promote the teaching effect.