A Study On The Application Of Formative Assessment In English Vocabulary Teaching In Ordinary High School

Assessment runs through any links of English teaching, vocabulary teaching is no exception. This research will apply formative assessment in English vocabulary teaching. The purposes are to mobilizing students’ learning interest, improving students’ thinking ability, digging the students’ potential, helping students to control the learning process, developing good study habits and then enhancing their self-confidence.Formative assessment is based on humanism and constructivism, which is not only assess the process and effect of language learning, but also pay more attention to improving students’ learning ability, changing their learning attitude and focusing on their autonomous learning ability. It is beneficial for students to change from the object to the subject in the process of assessment.The research takes the High School students of Dalian as the experiment subject. The experiment lasted for 12 weeks, and 86 grade one students from two intact classes will participate in this experiment. Among them 42 students as the experiment group, and 44 students as the control group. Before the experiment, both of them need to accept the vocabulary test of the same level, which proves they have the same level in vocabulary. During the experiment, the teacher will apply formative assessment in experiment group while to the control group will use the traditional assessment methods. After the experiment, the two groups need to accept another vocabulary test to see if they’ve made a great difference.The major findings of this research are the students in experiment group have made more progress in vocabulary performance than control group. Specific performance in three parts: firstly, the attitude of experiment group is more positive than control group, they are more willing to learn vocabulary; secondly, the vocabulary achievement of experiment group is more higher than control group; lastly, the autonomous learning ability of experiment group has a greater improvement than control group. That means using formative assessment in vocabulary teaching is more effective than traditional assessment.This paper discusses the characteristics and functional of formative assessment to check the high school students’ vocabulary learning process, thus to improve the quality of vocabulary teaching and enhance the students’ interest of vocabulary learning.