Impacts Of Feedback In Formative Assessment On Ethnic Minority Students’ English Teaching

Ministry of Education proposed that teachers should fully make use of both formative and summative assessments in teaching in New Curriculum Standard in 2001. In recent years, teachers and educational researchers have shown a growing interest in implementation of formative assessment in teaching. In current English teaching, however, summative assessment still plays a dominant role even though it has its disadvantages in English teaching. It over emphasizes the learning results, the learning and teaching process are undervalued, and also individual differences and students’ learning needs are neglected. By comparison,formative assessment focuses on teaching process, and pays attention to the promotion and evaluation of students’ learning from different angles. The main purpose of formative assessment is not only to provide feedback to know learners’ current learning situation but also offer help for teachers to modify the teaching.Improving the ethnic minority students’ English teaching is of great importance for their self-development and promote development of English education on the whole. The ethnic minority students have different learning needs and they are good at English speaking compared with most of the Chinese students. It is unreasonable to evaluate their performance in English learning with the same assessment criteria. In order to explore the relationship between formative assessment and the ethnic minority students’ English teaching, the author conducted the research in preparatory department in Qinghai Nationality University. The thesis attempts to explore the following three research issues:(1) What impacts do formative assessment and feedback have on ethnic minority students’ English teaching?(2) What are the students’ attitudes toward formative assessment and feedback?(3) How will effective feedback be provided and formative assessment be applied in English teaching to satisfy ethnic minority students’ English learning needs and promote English teaching?In order to answer the three research questions above, experiment was conducted in preparatory department in Qinghai Nationality University from September 8th 2015 to January 12 th 2016. 100 students from two classes are chosen as the research subjects. Three research instruments are used to fulfill the research goals. Pre-questionnaire is used to acquire students’ background information, including their interests and confidence in English learning, their feelings to English learning and their expectations to English teaching and teachers. Then several formative assessment methods, for instance, classroom observation, interview, rating scales, class quizzes and portfolio are used in experimental class to assess students’ performance in English learning. During the research, an interview is carried out to investigate students’ attitudes toward formative assessment and feedback. At the end of the semester, post-questionnaire is delivered and post-test is conducted to verify the impacts of formative assessment on students’ English learning and teacher’s teaching.The research results suggested that ethnic minority students hold a positive attitudes toward formative assessment, and they like formative assessment methods used by the author. Formative assessment can not only greatly improve their learning interests, build up their learning confidence but also can satisfy their learning needs and expectations to English teaching. However, since the interference of their mother tongue and lacking of teaching experience, they hold negative attitudes toward feedback especially the oral form feedback. They believed that they sometimes can’t completely understand these feedback in oral form in class and these feedback gave them little help in their English learning. Although they show great interests to English learning, the results of post-test shows that formative assessment can not promote students’ performance in English test in a short time. We should insist on using formative assessment and exploring some practical ways of providing oral form feedback in ethnic minority students’ English teaching.