Exploring How Process-based Formative Assessment Influences Chinese EFL Learners'academic English Writing Ability

With the transformation of English writing instruction from product approach to process approach,assessment for English writing has shown a tendency to change from summative assessment(SA)to formative assessment(FA).And the process-oriented FA has enjoyed much popularity in education assessment these years,especially for the teaching of writing.However,the application of FA for process-based academic English writing(AEW)of college students has rarely been studied.This paper,employing both quantitative and qualitative methods,is designed to explore the effectiveness of FA in the process approach of AEW for EFL learners in China.This study involves two classes of 57 students as the experimental group and the control group,who attended the AEW class taught by the same instructor.The difference between the two groups lies in that during the whole instructional process of the academic English writing course,formative assessment was employed in the experimental group while summative assessment was implemented in the control group.And to be specific,the quantitative methods include a questionnaire investigation,pre-and post-tests of both groups and the comparison of the scores to the three drafts of course paper in the experimental group while the qualitative methods contain the classroom observation,an interview and the text analysis of the course paper of the experimental group after receiving formative feedback.Results from the T-test show that there is significant difference between the post-tests of the experimental group and the control group.Meanwhile,the results of repeated measures ANOVA demonstrate significant difference among the three drafts of the participants in the experimental group.Qualitative studies also show that formative feedback provided by either peers or the course instructor has been treated seriously by most learners,which contributes to the gradual improvement of the quality of their writing.In conclusion,the results of the study suggest that theprocess-oriented FA is more effective than the product-based summative assessment(SA)for the improvement of learners' AEW ability and their interest and learning autonomy as well.