The Application Of Formative Assessment In English Reading Teaching For English Majors

Formative assessment is a kind of comprehensive evaluation which mainly evaluates students' learning achievements,strategies,emotional attitudes and habits etc.during their study process.It needs the interaction between teachers and students,and it provides some timely feedback to the teaching activities,which can help improve students' learning abilities and teachers' teaching methods.Based on multiple intelligence theory and the constructivism theory,this research explores the application of formative assessment in English reading,trying to find out what effect formative assessment can make on students' learning achievements,the change of reading strategies and the cultivation of their emotional attitudes in reading.The experimental subjects are the sophomore English majors of School of Foreign Languages of Shandong University of Technology.One class is regarded as the control group,the other as the experimental group.The pre-test results show that there is no significant difference between the two groups.The experiment,in which task-based teaching method is mainly adopted and group learning as the main learning form,uses formative assessment including teachers' assessment,student self-assessment and peer assessment.The students are encouraged to learn to cooperate with each other in order to improve their interest in English reading and strengthen their motivation for learning.The data from questionnaires,examination and class observation is collected,and the results analyzed are as follows: Firstly,formative assessment is more effective to improve students' academic achievements in English reading.Secondly,formative assessment is helpful for students to master study strategies.The results of the strategy questionnaires show that the effect of formative assessment on meta-cognitive,affective,social and memory strategies is obvious.Thirdly,formative assessment is more helpful to facilitate students to form positive attitude toward English reading.Although this study has proved the efficiency of the application of formative assessment in English reading teaching,especially for the improvement of students' English reading ability,it is limited by the experimental time and the small sample size,so it still needs further testing.