A Study Of Formative Assessment In The Process-focused Approach Of Teaching English Writing In Senior High Schools

English writing is one of the weak links of English teaching in senior high schools. For many years, English writing has been taught by traditional product-focused approach. It focuses too much on language usage, sentence patterns and grammatical mistakes. And most teachers have adopted the corresponding evaluation method: summative assessment. This evaluation method only offers the final grade of students' writing, but neglecting the responding process and non-cognitive factors of their study. In 2003, Chinese Ministry of Education formulated The New English Curriculum Standard, it sets a higher requirement for senior high school students in writing. It not only acquires students are capable of writing a passage to cope with the examinations, but also demands the teacher to arouse students' interests in teaching process and cultivate their writing abilities to deal with practical works.In order to meet the requirement of new curriculum reform's ideal, this experiment aims at improving students' writing efficiency and inspiring their writing motivations. The procedure that applies formative assessment in every stage of process-focused approach to help students improve their writing skills is explored. This research is done in Huixian Second Senior High school, a school in Huixian county, Henan province. Two paralleled classes of grade 2 are chosen to make the contrastive experiment. By using research instruments such as questionnaires, test papers and writing portfolios, students' writing process and learning results are recorded, then software SPSS 21.0 is utilized to analyze the data.According to the analysis results, the conclusions are drawn as follows: 1)According to the daily teaching observation and questionnaires results, students' interests, attitudes and motivations toward English writing have been changed. Applying formative assessment in the process approach of teaching English writing is accepted by students extensively; 2) This research makes a reasonable division of the links of students' writing practice and evaluation, which includes inside and outside class activities. It promises that formative assessment consumes less time than before, this clever application is feasible in large-scale class teaching; 3)Writing capacity disparities between individuals are narrowed. And the writing scores of experimental class(EC)'s students are more or less improved and superior to control class(CC)'s after the experiment.