An Empirical Study On Performance Assessment In Junior High School English Teaching

The new curriculum reform is gradually stepping from the theoretical level to the practical level nowadays. However, the main way of evaluating students’ English learning level in our country is still the traditional summative assessment which chooses the teacher as the subject, the written test as the carrier, score as the quantization system. To address such a problem in present situation, a new type of teaching assessment way is in great need. Thus, based on the constructivism theory, multiple intelligence theory and situated learning theory, the author starts from the requirements of the new curriculum standard of junior high school English and the reality of the assessment ways that we used nowadays in junior high school English classroom, to put forward a new assessment way, namely performance assessment. Comparing with the foreign countries, we are still at the experimental and exploration level in terms of the research of performance assessment. There are not so many domestic studies about the research of performance assessment. Performance assessment refers to a systematical assessment that our students need to apply their own knowledge to solve the new problems or to complete the undetermined tasks. The author applies the performance assessment in English class in order to solve the following problems in English teaching process:1. After the application of performance assessment, what’s the change of students’ learning motivation and interest in the experimental class?2. Whether the experimental students’ English integrated competence can be improved or not after the application of performance assessment?The author chose two parallel groups for comparison. 120 junior high school students who came from two classes of grade one in No. 2 Middle School in Datong, Shanxi province are selected as the research subjects. The teaching experiment lasts for almost three months. The experimental class(EC) adopts the performance assessment method and the control class(CC) uses the traditional summative assessment way during the experiment time.The author firstly gives both classes a pre-test. After three months, the author conducts a post-test to them and makes a survey of students in the experimental class via a questionnaire. In the end, the author uses the SPSS. 17. 0 to analyze the experimental data and conducts the T-test for independent sample. The data shows that there are no obviously differences between the EC and CC regarding integrated competence in English before the experiment, however, the students of experimental class(EC) behave well in their integrate competence and get a higher score compared with the control class(CC) in English after the experiment. Also the analysis of the questionnaire shows that through the application of performance assessment in English class, the students of experimental class show greater interest in English learning and they learn English more actively.The results of the study show that the application of this new assessment method—performance assessment in junior high school English teaching can better promote the ability of students’ integrate competence in English and can improve students’ learning interest and motivation. This research applies performance assessment in junior high school English teaching process and to a certain degree, of some originality. However, it inevitably exists some limitations because of the limited samples in the research and the limited time for the research.