A Study Of The Effectiveness Of The Application Of Formative Assessment In Middle School English Reading Teaching

As an important part of English learning, reading can largely entail learners’ comprehensive abilities in using English. What’s more, reading achievement continues to be a major focus in the field of education. Therefore, the improvement of students’ reading competence should be paid much, attention to. Many factors have great influence on the improvement of students’ English reading competence, one of which is assessment. It chiefly includes summative assessment and formative assessment. English Curriculum Standards for Nine-year Compulsory Education (2011 Edition) has pointed out that the combination of summative and formative assessment can benefit both teachers and students in evaluating the process of teaching and learning. With regard to the status quo, many researches on the application of formative assessment in English teaching have appeared and some schools take a lead to combine summative and formative assessment, attempting to build a more systematic and overall assessment system. However, in the application of formative assessment in English reading teaching, the great efforts are being expended with so little apparent result. Besides, middle school English reading teaching paves the way for the further study in the following years so that it is urgent to improve the effectiveness of the application of formative assessment in middle school English reading teaching.Three research questions are given as follows.1. Why has the current application of formative assessment in middle school English reading teaching brought unsatisfactory effects so far?2. How and in what ways can teachers improve the effectiveness of the application of formative assessment in middle school English reading teaching?3. In what aspects and to what extent can the valid implementation of formative assessment promote middle school English reading teaching?In the five-month internship, the researcher has investigated the current application of formative assessment in middle school English reading teaching. According to the investigation, the targeted methods have been put forward in the experiment. By means of questionnaires, interviews and tests, data of the experiment is collected. Besides, SPSS is used to analyze collected data.There are five chapters in the present thesis. Chapter One gives a brief introduction to the background, the purpose and the significance of the current study. The framework of the whole thesis will also be included. Chapter Two gives a review of related theoretical basis, content and the current development of the formative assessment theory. Chapter Three exhibits the methodology of the research, including research questions, instruments, participants and the detailed research procedures. The elaborative analyses and discussion of the data collected from the tests, questionnaires and interviews will be presented in Chapter Four. Chapter Five is the concluding part, during which major findings, implications and limitations will be explained.