The Application Of Formative Assessment In English Teaching

Assessment is an important part of English teaching. But for many years tests and exams were considered to be the only way to evaluate students, which is not good and fair enough for students. This traditional summative assessment becomes powerless in testing students' language competence and evaluating non-cognitive factors on language learning. The learner-centered formative assessment is being developed nowadays.This thesis aims at studying the effectiveness of students' English learning by using formative assessment in English teaching. It first reviews both America and China's achievements in this aspect; and points out the necessity of applying formative assessment in English teaching. Then it looks at the categories of formative assessment, including its definition, functions, common characters and benefits of formative assessment. The paper also provides some techniques and tools of formative assessment, including classroom observation, conferences, interviews, questionnaires, dialogue journals and portfolios.In order to find out whether formative assessment can have some effect on students' English learning, the author carried out an experiment of applying portfolios in students' English learning and 4 specific hypotheses were made regarding the formative assessment. From the results and statistical analysis, we can see the experiment is successful and the 4 hypotheses were verified. It can be concluded from the experiment that formative assessment is more effective to aid students to master meta-cognitive strategies, strengthen motivation, form positive affect and attitude than traditional summative assessment and therefore it improves students' English achievement. Discussions are also made with respect to the implications and limitations of the experiment.