An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Formative Assessment On Art Students' Spoken English Competence In University

Evaluation is a necessary part in the educational system.And how to promote students' spoken English competence through effective assessment is an important research topic in college English teaching.Formative assessment(FA)is a kind of class activity paradigm oriented towards progressive achievement.It requires the evaluator(teachers,students)to adopt,adjust and design various tasks(classroom questions,task,paper test,portfolios,etc.),through which students' data can be collected,analyzed and explained systematically with appropriate evaluation tools(checklist,marking assessment learning criteria).The results can serve as feedback for evaluators to adjust the process of teaching and learning so as to promote the development of students' language competence.So far domestic research on this evaluation method has been extensive,but empirical research on students majoring in arts needs to be enriched.This research explores the effects of FA on art students' spoken English competence in university from two aspects—the change of their spoken English learning strategies and their spoken English ability.It attempts to answer the following questions: 1.Does the application of FA affect the spoken English learning strategies of art students in university? 2.Does the FA affect the spoken English ability of art students in university? The freshmen,in the year of2017 majoring in Communication and Media(art students)in Shanxi Normal University,were taken as the research subjects.Students were divided into the experimental class(EC)and the control class(CC)randomly for oral English teaching experiment for one semester.In the experiment,the researcher applied the FA to teach the EC and summative assessment(SA)to the CC.Before the experiment,both groups responded to spoken English learning strategies questionnaire and took the spoken English test.A week before the end of the experiment,two classes filled in the same spoken English learning strategies questionnaire and took spoken English test again.During the experiment,the researcher interviewed the students of the EC and data were collected and analyzed.Results from the research show: 1)The EC students' spoken English learning strategies,especially the data of cognitive strategies,metacognitive strategies and affective strategies significantly increased,comparing with the CC.However,for the test significance of communicative strategies(P value 0.156),indicating that there was no significant difference between the EC and the CC.2)The FA plays a significant role in improving art students' spoken English ability on special topics.According to the differential data analysis between the classes' pre-test and post-test,it is found that the average score of the EC is 4.53,which is significantly higher than that of the CC(2.02).Meanwhile,the standard deviation of EC is2.14,indicating the enlarging gap between the students' scores of the EC.On the whole,the research results show FA is an effective method for evaluating art students in university in spoken English learning.