A Study On The Application Of Formative Assessment In Junior High School English Teaching

At present,in junior high school English teaching,the evaluation of students is still based on academic performance,that is,the summative evaluation.Students are judged only by their academic performance,ignoring the differences between individual students.It cannot reflect the problems in the learning process,let alone analyze the problems and give timely feedback to students.Passively accepting knowledge makes students lose interest in English.Meanwhile,this evaluation method brings great pressure to students and is not conducive to cultivating students' core competence of English and improving their learning ability.The Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standard(2011)points out that junior high school English teaching should pay attention to the combination of formative assessment and summative assessment and give priority to formative assessment so as to enable students to reflect and summarize effectively.In view of the disadvantages of summative assessment,in this thesis,the writer applied formative assessment to junior high school English teaching and mainly studied and tried to answer the following three questions: 1.Can formative assessment stimulate students' interest in learning English and form active learning attitude? 2.Can formative assessment promote the cultivation of students' learning strategies? 3.Can formative assessment improve students' academic achievement?The participants in this study were 61 Grade One students from Baishan No.10 Middle School.In which 31 students were in the experimental class and the other 30 were in the control class.In the teaching of the experimental class,students' basic knowledges and skills,interest and attitude in learning English,and learning strategies were evaluated in a formative way.The original summative assessment was still adopted in the control class.The English paper of Junior High Entrance Examination in Baishan City was used to understand two classes' academic level before the experiment.The questionnaire survey was conducted with the help of another English teacher,and relevant data were collected.The questionnaire focuses on the students' attitude,interestand strategies in learning English before the experiment.To make up for the shortage of the pre-test and the questionnaire and get more information about students' inner thoughts,three students in the experimental class were interviewed after pre-test.After a semester's experiment,a post-test,a questionnaire survey and an interview were conducted to study the impact of formative assessment on students' interest and attitude,learning strategies and academic performance both in the experimental class and in the control class.The methodologies which were mainly used in this study were literature research,experimental method,questionnaire method,interview and other research methods.After the experiment,the data collected before and after the experiment were statistically analyzed by Excel and the effect of the experiment was studied.The result of the research proves formative assessment can help students to cultivate their interest,promote their attitude,develop appropriate learning strategies and make a better academic achievement.However,there are still many problems in practice.On the one hand,the existing workable non-test assessment tools are limited;on the other hand,formative assessment puts forward higher requirements for teachers who are under the influence of junior high school examination system and requires teachers to put in more time and energy,which makes it more difficult to popularize formative assessment in junior high school English teaching.