A Practical Study On The Developmental Evaluation Strategies In English Writing Instruction In Senior High School

Writing is an important part of high school English teaching.In order to improve students’ English writing level,teachers spend a lot of time and energy on students,composition evaluation.However,summative assessment is frequently applied by English teachers which merely evaluates students’writing level by tests while ignores the cultivation of students’ writing ability,which makes their English writing level hard to raise.Therefore,this study attempts to apply the developmental evaluation strategies to the teaching of high school English writing,aiming to examine the influence of developmental evaluation on the improvement of students’ English writing and raise students’ English writing ability.The research questions include:1)What are the traditional evaluation methods used in English writing teaching in senior high school?2)What are the advantages of developmental evaluation strategies,compared with other evaluation methods?3)What is the impact of the developmental evaluation strategies on senior high school students’ English writing ability?Based on Constructivism theory and the multiple intelligence theory,this study takes students from two senior high school classes of Liaoning Province as the experimental subjects,including 48 students in the experimental class and 47 students in the controlled class.The average scores in English examinations of the two classes are similar and are taught by the same teacher,thus they are comparable.The author carried out the teaching experiment for a semester,using qualitative and quantitative methods.Before the experiment,students of both classes filled the questionnaire and completed the writing part of the 2013 college entrance examination of Liaoning Province within specified time.In the course of the experiment,the English teacher applied traditional English writing evaluation methods in the controlled class.At the same time,developmental evaluation strategies were used in the experimental class.At the end of the experiment,students of both classes were required to answer the questionnaire again and finish the writing part of the 2015 English college entrance examination of Liaoning Province.The author also randomly selected 15 students of the experimental class to interview,then used SPSS 17.0 to collect and analyze all the experimental data.From the collection and analysis of data,the author gets some major findings:First,both the traditional and the developmental evaluation strategies can raise students writing level.However,with the application of developmental evaluation strategies,students can improve much more.Second,the developmental evaluation strategies can remarkably increase students’writing interests and stimulate students’ independent learning.Third,students’ability of self-assessment and peer assessment have been built and improved as well.What’s more,certain students have established the reader awareness.This study can be used as a reference for the improvement of evaluation methods in English writing teaching of senior high school,which can solve such problems as the lack of evaluation strategies,teachers’heavy burden of evaluating compositions,and the ignorance of students’ thinking process.However,the experimental subjects of this study are limited,and the research time is only one semester.Thus,the long-term effect of the application of developmental evaluation strategies can not be demonstrated fully and needed further investigation.