An Investigation Into Assessment During Oral Presentation In Junior Middle School English Classes

The English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2017 edition)puts forward the idea of “optimizing the method of assessment and focusing on assessing students’ comprehensive language competence”.Therefore,“what to assess”and “how to assess” are major concerns of the current assessment reform.In order to explore the present situation of assessment,this study focuses on the oral presentation where students exhibit their competence.The key factors of assessments examined from three aspects: assessment design,the aspects assessed and assessment implementation.Lesson recordings of The 11 th National Junior English Basic Skills Competition have been selected to address the following questions:(1)To what extent is assessment built into the teaching design?(2)What aspects are commonly assessed during the oral presentation in junior middle school English classes?(3)At the stage of implementation,how is the assessment information processed?And who is the main assessor?In this investigation,26 lesson recordings were selected,and the oral presentation was transcribed.All the assessments during this period were numbered,summarized and classified.The assessments were analyzed from eight aspects in three stages through observation scales.The following results are obtained.(1)Some teachers already have the awareness of designing assessment and built the tasks of assessments in advance.However,the design is relatively rough and needs to be further refined,which is mainly reflected in the following two aspects.First,the design of the task fails to involve diverse competence,but similar to the traditional language practice that is difficult to promote students’ comprehensive language competence.Second,teachers neglect the design of scoring rules,resulting in the incomplete design procedure.(2)The aspects assessed are comprehensive relatively,including the content of the comprehensive language competence in the new curriculum standards,but the distribution is not balanced.Influenced by the content of traditional examinations,the language knowledge,language skills and emotional attitudes are the focus of assessments while learning strategies and cultural awareness are paid less attention.(3)On one hand,the processing of assessment information tends to be more detailed and complicated because more descriptive assessments promoting students’ learning are adopted in the classroom.But the overall processing is still easy,with praise,repetition and responses as the main feedback.Besides,the learning result is over emphasized compared with the learning process.On the other hand,the main assessors are teachers,while students lack assessment opportunities and assessment literacy.The present study has revealed an awakening awareness of assessment in class and at the same time a lack of a broader vision concerning the function,meanings of assessment.