An Empirical Research On Formative Assessment In Senior High School English Classroom

Educational assessment is an important part of senior English teaching. It plays the role of guiding, monitoring and adjusting instructions to guarantee the attainment of curriculum objectives, but also can judge the direct students’ study. Since the implementation of basic education reform, English curriculum system also make a big change. Along with the unceasing and thorough new curriculum reform, the assessment on the concept, process and method changes to adapt to the new curriculum standards. It requires the educators to rethink the purpose, contents, standards, methods of the assessment to set up a flexible, basis and scientific English teaching evaluation system. The formative assessment is the model which focuses on promoting the development of the students. In2011, the Ministry of Education put forward nine suggestions in the Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standard:"Assessment should pay attention to the students’comprehensive ability of language... Assessment should be the combination of formative assessment and summative assessment, pay attention to process and results, and achieve the harmony of students’ learning process and results of assessment. The theory and reality, however, are usually has a deviation. Affected by the exam-oriented education, traditional teaching emphasizes more on summative assessment than formative assessment in teaching process, which lead to the so-called "High-score and low-ability". The implement of formative assessment still has gap between the Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standard and teaching. This study tries to find the gap through the investigation, and find out measures to avoid these gaps.This thesis describes the related theories of modern education assessment and formative assessment briefly. According to the requirements of new curriculum standard, the Theory of Constructivism, Multiple Intelligences and Humanistic Theory, the writer make a research in high school English classroom formative assessment. This study uses104students and30teachers from Nanjing the13th middle school as the research object, and the methods such as classroom observation, questionnaire and interview were studied. Through the investigation and analysis, some problems are discovered in the current implementation of formative assessment in senior high schools:the subjects of formative assessment is still teachers, students have not been effectively involved; the methods of formative assessment are simplify, still focus on test scores; the feedback information is not comprehensive and timely, etc. At last, suggestions are put forward for the effective implementation of formative assessment in senior high schools. The suggestions are proposed respectively for how to implement formative assessment, for senior English teachers and for senior students. The writer hopes that this study could be able to update the teaching ideas and teachers pay more attention to the application of formative assessment in English teaching, using scientific methods to implement the formative assessment continuously.