A Survey On Formative Assessment In Junior Middle School English Reading Teaching

Educational assessment plays an important role in junior middle school Englishreading teaching. On the one hand, educational assessment affects teaching content andteaching method, on the other hand, it also affects the learning process and learningresult of students. Nowadays, formative assessment is popular among teachers.Formative assessment can improve students’ English reading ability and help studentsform English reading strategies. Currently, most of the research subjects of formativeassessment are city schools, teachers and students of city schools. The purpose of thisarticle is to survey the application situation of formative assessment in rural middleschool English reading teaching and give suggestions according to the existingproblems.The theoretical bases of this research are Bloom’s educational objectiveclassification theory，Gagne’s learning results classification theory and Piaget andVygotsky’s constructive theory. Taking20teachers and135students of Niu ChangMiddle School (A country school of Yun Nan province) as the research subjects, thisresearch intends to study the performance of teachers and students before, during andafter the application of formative assessment, and this paper concludes that theapplying of formative assessment in rural middle school English reading teachingneeds further improvement. The teachers master most of the theories about formativeassessment. But they need to deepen and widen their knowledge of formativeassessment and practice more. When applying the formative assessment in teaching,most of the teachers in rural middle schools didn’t clearly state the formativeobjectives in their lesson plan. And influenced by the summative assessment, most ofthe assessments are teacher-centered. Teachers have a good performance in the postapplication phase, because they usually give students specific assessment in time.Similar to teachers’ situation, students also have a better performance at the postapplication phase than at pre and while application phases, but the situation ofstudents’ application of formative assessment in middle school English readinglearning on the whole is not good. Most of the students couldn’t make a considerable and specific reading plan and formative assessment standards; part of the studentsdon’t take part in formative assessment actively; some students can’t evaluate theirown reading learning and other pupils’ reading learning, even under the guidance ofteachers. After analyzing the data and the problems, this paper gives some suggestionsabout how to deal with problems which teachers and students have in applyingformative assessment. There are two measures to solve teachers’ problems. Teacherscan widen and deepen their knowledge about formative assessment through readingbooks and journals, and can improve their applying ability of formative assessmentthrough learning the applying methods and steps of city schools. The improvement onthe students’ side needs the cooperation of teachers and students. Teachers shouldmake students understand the conception and the importance of formative assessment.Students should cooperate with teachers and participate actively.