An Empirical Study On Formative Assessment Of Non-English Major Students On The Teaching Of Listening Comprehension

Assessment has always been a significant part of education. Assessment is always necessarily needed to measure the progress of teaching and learning.For a long time, the main way to assess students is summative assessment in English classroom. Summative assessment is always related to a test paper to check a students'performance in English at a certain period. What the result has reflected could not exactly show what students have learned. Besides, students only focus what might be tested and neglect others information that would not be tested in the paper. As time passes, scholars begin to criticize the validity and reliability of summative assessment. The application of formative assessment is advocated all over the country, for it lays emphasis on the process instead of the result, fosters students'interest in learning and develops their self-learning ability.This research aims at finding whether formative assessment plays a positive role in enhancing students'listening proficiency and facilitates the improvement of non-English major students' listening than summative assessment.This paper consists of five chapters. Chapter One introduces purpose, significance, and structure of the research. Chapter Two reviews background information concerning assessment and listening. Chapter Three describes the research questions, design of the experiment, data collection as well as data analysis. Two classes have been involved, experimental class and control class. Both pretest and posttest have been taken at the beginning and the end of the experiment. There have been also two questionnaires in this experiment. One teacher has taught these two classes for the whole semester with the same content. The control class has adopted summative assessment, while the experimental class formative assessment. At the end of the semester, both classes took the posttest and questionnaires. Then the data has been analyzed by SPSS. Chapter Four is the results and discussion. In this part, the results of the experiment has been analyzed and discussed. Chapter Five summarizes the major findings and limitations of this experiment, and offers implication and recommendations for the future study.