The Application Of Rubrics In Senior Middle School English Writing Teaching

Currently, two pressing problems exist in English writing teaching and learning in senior high school:firstly, teachers’ teaching methods and assessing method need improvement within limited classroom hours, and second, students are not informed of, and therefore have not a clear idea about, what a good composition is and how their writing is to be judged. With the reform of New Curriculum Standard, there is a shift of focus of assessing writing from result to process and from distinguishing or categorizing students to developing their potentials. Rubric as a new assessing tool is thus introduced into the Chinese educational assessment. However, how to use writing rubrics to enhance students’ writing skills and carry out the assessing theory in the classroom still wait for more exploration and classroom investigation.In the light of the new requirements on Ordinary High School English Curriculum Standards (test) for high school students, this research tries to apply the rubric in the writing teaching class on the basis of the theory of formative assessment, the principle of 6+1 traits writing rubric and constructivism. To improve students’writing skill, rubric is used to instruct students how to write, to modify and assess their work in terms of five aspects, including contents, organization, sentence, phrases and spelling & punctuation.Our empirical studies indicate that except for vocabulary, all student-subjects have improvements in terms of content, organization, sentence, and spelling & punctuation. Though students with good or average command of English progress in varying degrees, they all have improvements by one level or two. Our analysis shows that by using rubrics, students are made clearer about the scoring standards before writing, conscious of language use while writing, and aware of self-reflection after writing. For teachers, on the other hand, rubrics prove an effective tool, enabling them to assess more students’ compositions within limited time and to give more timely, detailed and accountable feedbacks. In short, our study confirms the positive effect of the proposed rubrics used in the writing teaching experiment; it will, hopefully, contribute with the gathered evidence to studies on rubrics’ effect on composition teaching and learning.