Action Research On The Performance Assessment Of Oral Communication For Chinese In Primary Schools

"21st Century skills" lists oral communication as one of the important competence of students' development,and China's curriculum standards also regard it as an vital part of a language course.However,the training of oral communication is often simplified even neglected by teachers and students in daily teaching and learning,and its assessment is superficial.How can we know what students have learned in oral communication? To what extent should students study? How to use assessment methods to promote the development of students' oral communication skills? Since oral communication skills are becoming increasingly significant nowadays,It is vital to answer the questions above.First,based on the existing literature,this paper answers “How to?” question by constructing the development process of oral communication performance assessment in the context of the matching between oral communication and performance assessment,which includes four aspects: the construction of learning objectives,the design of the performance task,the founding of the performance rubric and the classroom application.Secondly,the paper explores how to apply performance assessment in oral communication learning with the method of action research,trying to answer “how is it going” and “how to make it better”.Through this action research,it is found that performance assessment can provide orientation as well as motivation for students' oral communication learning,and can lead them to make improvement based on introspection;it can also improve teachers' professional development in teaching and research capabilities,teaching attitude and assessment literacy.The whole study lasted for three months and can be divided into pre-study and two-round action research.The purpose of the pre-study was to understand and analyze the oral communication teaching status of teacher T,so that there would be orientations for the next two rounds.The first round is the trial and exploration phase,in which the performance assessment development process is found to have the following problems in design and practice: In terms of learning objectives,the quality of assessment declinesdue to students having difficulties in understanding the goals;problems in the implementation of performance tasks are found as discourse hegemony,counterproductive assistance from teachers and tight link time;problems in the operation of the performance rubric are shown as students' failure on determining their own level,low acceptance of peer feedback,and taking none improvement actions based on the feedback.In response to the problems above,the second round of actions adopted improvement and optimization measures,working on the actual problems in a targeted manner,and continued to discover new problems and reflect on them to propose further improvements.After the research,this paper has come to four conclusions: 1.A set of basic procedures is requisite for the performance assessment of oral communication;2.It is necessary for the oral communication performance assessment to get students deeply involved;3.It is imperative for teachers to master certain evaluation qualities and corresponding strategies;4.The process of action research proves the feasibility and effectiveness of the application process.