An Empirical Study On Formative Assessment In English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

Writing reflects students' English comprehensive ability.It plays an important role in English teaching and learning.The teaching assessment will exert an significant influence on students' improvement in writing.The traditional summative assessment plays a leading role in English teaching class in which students seldom take part in the assessing activities.To a certain extent,it ignores the assessment on students' creativity and subjectivity,which is not helpful to keep their learning enthusiasm and persistent learning motivation.Recently,formative assessment,which is deemed as an effective kind of assessment,has received more and more attention.Formative assessment combines students' self-assessment,peer assessment with teacher assessment together.It provides the most direct feedback for teachers and students,which can greatly improve students' learning competence and help teachers adjust teaching plans in time.The New English Curriculum Standard(2017)requires that teachers should try to combine the formative assessment with summative assessment in the teaching contexts,with formative assessment acting as the primary assessment method.Therefore,this empirical study aims to explore the impact of formative assessment on students from two aspects: writing proficiency as well as writing interest and attitude.Qualitative and quantitative methods were used in this research.The research intended to figure out the following two questions: 1)Can formative assessment improve students' writing proficiency? 2)Can formative assessment exert an influence on students' English writing interest and attitude?The 100 participants were from two parallel classes in a Senior High School in Jiangxi.The instruments were pre-test,post-test,pre-questionnaire,post-questionnaire and interview.The experiment lasted for three months.Writing teaching in the experimental class was guided by formative assessment while in the controlled class,teacher still used the traditional assessment method.The collected data were calculated and analyzed by software SPSS17.0.Based on the analysis of the results from the experiment,it was concluded that the application of formative assessment greatly improved students' writing proficiency,and it exerted a positive effect on students' writing interest and attitude.Therefore,formative assessment has an instructive significance for English teaching and learning in senior high school,which implies that English teachers should pay more attention to formative assessment in teaching process.And some implications about the methodological and practical applications of formative assessment are put forward for further studies.