Practicing Curriculum-embedded Assessment In English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

Curriculum-embedded assessment(CEA hereafter)is a learner-oriented assessment which aligns assessment activities with curriculum objectives formally designed before instruction by instructors and curriculum developers,then occurs at specific joints in curriculum for obtaining information.Valuing students' active engagement,this assessment scheme traces students' leaning process,progressive performance and learning potential in a period of time,which contributes to timely reflection and adjustment of learning.Advantageous as CEA seems to be,few studies have been carried out to confirm its role in promoting students to learn,especially to learn specific skills,such as reading and writing.This study aims to verify the effectiveness of CEA on senior high school students' writing.By conducting an experiment of writing assessment,it hopes to broaden assessment schemes,promote students' participation in assessment and improve senior high school students' English writing.The experiment was guided by the following three research questions.1)Can CEA improve senior high school students' writing competence?2)What is the effect of CEA on senior high school students' use of writing strategies?3)What are students' attitudes towards the assessment activities in the framework of such a CEA?The study involved 116 participants from a newly-built key senior high school of Fengcheng county.The subjects were senior one students,who were incorporated into two classes.One was the experimental class,which was instructed by adopting CEA teaching practice;the other was the control class that accepted the traditional writing assessment method.The duration of the experiment was nearly 16 weeks and the assessment materials mainly came from students' written-products in weekly writing tests.The research tools in this research were from three aspects,which contained a questionnaire,two tests and students' feedback form.After the experiment,software SPSS 20.0 was adopted to calculate and analyze these data results.Based on the results analyses after the experiment,the findings of the study can be summarized as follows:First,the application of CEA might not have a significant positive effect on students' promotion in writing competence though there is a tendency of such effect.Second,only formulating strategy use has been improved significantly as a result of CEA practice in writing teaching.Other strategies use seem not to be promoted.CEA teaching practice tends to better facilitate the low-level achievers' use of monitoring strategy and formulating strategy in senior writing teaching,while high-level achiever's use of writing strategies have not been improved.Third,the whole application of CEA and some specific activities in CEA(such as teacher evaluation,second draft,progressive feedback and model essay presentation activity)are more acceptable than others by students for most of them think these assessment tools are more helpful to improve their writing.Other activities of CEA teaching practice,including brainstorming,self-evaluation,group discussion and peer-evaluation are attached less significance and are not regarded as beneficial to their writing by most of them.According to the findings in the research,some implications can be drawn for EFL assessment teaching: 1)the teacher needs to elaborate assessment scheme comprehensively to students,and provide them with enough assessment demonstration.2)students should be encouraged to elicit more assessment involvement,and teacher needs to make students recognize the importance of their roles in the assessment.3)the teacher should pay attention to the design of timely feedback based on students' assessment performance in the assessment activity.