An Empirical Study On Formative Assessment In English Writing Teaching In Senior High Schools

The Ordinary High School English Curriculum Standards put forward higher demands on students’ English writing ability, so teachers’ teaching philosophy and teaching methods must meet the needs of the new curriculum. Meanwhile, an objective requirement of the new curriculum reform calls forth a scientific and effective evaluation system. Nowadays, the traditional summative assessment is still widely used in the senior high English writing teaching. To adjust to the concept of improving the evaluation system in the new curriculum standard, while meeting the requirements of promoting combination of formative assessment and summative assessment which focus on both the results and the process and viewing formative evaluation as the main part, the study will apply formative assessment to the teaching of senior high school English writing, emphasizing the importance of the evaluation process of students’ writing to obtain more objective feedback by students’ self-evaluation and peer evaluation, and thus teachers are capable of acquiring better understanding of the students’ writing conditions and improve the level of English writing teaching. In order to implement the specific application of formative assessment in English writing teaching, students are allowed to make self-evaluation and peer review of the composition in writing classes and teachers will give corresponding evaluation after school.The thesis is an empirical study on how to put formative evaluation into practice, which includes 3 main questions:1) Is formative assessment beneficial for improving high school students’ interest in English writing?2) Does formative assessment have an influence on the use of writing strategies of senior high school students?3) Can formative assessment improve senior high school students’ English writing scores?This study analyzes the current status of English writing in the senior high school and the requirements for the English writing course evaluation and the English writing evaluation that the Ordinary High School English Curriculum Standards set, elaborates the definitions and methods of the formative assessment, and reviews the studies of formative assessment in foreign language teaching both at home and abroad. Then based on the humanistic education philosophy, constructivism theory, the theory of multiple intelligences, the author carried out an English writing teaching experiment for one academic semester to find out the impact of the formative assessment on English writing teaching.The objects of the study are the students of two classes of Senior 2 from Laiyang No.1 Middle School who are taught by the author. There are 120 students in all, and there are 60 students in each class. The questionnaire and tests are used as the research instruments in this study and the data are processed by the statistic software SPSS17.0 and Excel. Before formative assessment was applied in English writing teaching, both two classes were given a writing test, the data of which show that there was no significant difference between them, so they were randomly designated as the controlled class and experimental class. The questionnaires were done before the experiment to get an overall understanding students’ interest in English writing and their use of writing strategies. In the experimental class, students’ self-assessment, peer-assessment and teacher-assessment were applied in the students’ writing assessing process. Thus the students could get involved in the assessing activity and reflect on their own writing. After the experiment of an academic semester, the two classes were given a post-test of English writing, and the post-questionnaire was also used to investigate the changes in using writing strategies and the change of students’ attitude and interest in writing in the experimental class.Through the application of formative assessment in English writing teaching, the students show more interest in the English writing and their confidence in writing has been significantly improved. Students learn more about the writing strategies and the strengths and weaknesses of their own writing, which can help them correct their writing mistakes, improve their English writing. Students become increasingly proactive to correct their own compositions after the experiment. In the meanwhile, they learn to compare notes and learn from each other to promote their own writing ability by peer-assessment. It’s obvious that their writing motivation and consciousness are significantly enhanced in the training process. The use of the writing evaluation form not only enhances the communication between students and teachers, but also makes the writing needs of students more clear to the teachers, thus helping teachers find more bright spots in the students’ writing and increase their positive evaluation on the students. The formative assessment experiment in the English writing teaching also shows a significant difference in the writing scores between the students who use formative assessment and those who don’t. Furthermore, after the application of formative assessment in English writing teaching, the experimental class writing scores are generally better than those of the control class. The overall degree of dispersion in the students’ writing test scores has reduced slightly and the gap between the students’ writing scores has been narrowed, but still slightly higher than that of the controlled class. All in all, although formative assessment in the English writing has not achieved the desired expectations, there is still certain feasibility in the senior English writing teaching.