A Study Of The Effects Of Student Self-Assessment On The EFL Writing Of Chinese Non-English Majors

This thesis investigates the feasibility of integrating self-assessment into English writing instruction with the focus on the effects of student self-assessment on students' EFL writing. Thirty-six second-year undergraduate non-English majors in a higher vocational college in Jinan, Shandong Province participated in eight-week writing and assessing tasks, during which they were engaged in a training session on self-assessment before asked to assess their own writing performance.In this study, apart from the writing assignments and analytic scoring, questionnaires and interviews were also employed to gather information on the students' views on the effects of self-assessment.The results of the study show that students are able to make judgments about the overall quality of their writing in a manner consistent with those made by the teacher. When further investigation towards this consistency is made, it is found that the agreement between student self-assessment (SA) and teacher assessment (TA) only exists in such features as content and organization. There is no agreement between student self-assessment and teacher assessment on vocabulary, language use, and mechanics. In addition, the study reveals that students made significant improvements in content, organization, and mechanics of their writing after the practice of self-assessment while qualities concerning vocabulary and language use have been improved but not to a significant level. Finally, the study demonstrates that the practice of self-assessment has exerted positive influence on students' perceptions of their writing skills in terms of organization, language use and mechanics while it does not result in any change of students' perceptions of their writing skills in content and vocabulary. Students felt more confident of their writing skills and they valued the importance of the revising of essays.The study designed to examine the effects of student self-assessment on the writing of Chinese non-English majors can be a great help to the teaching of English writing and can also provide pedagogical implications for the English language teaching in the Chinese-specific context. Specifically, these implications are conductive to working out a set of new models of the teaching of writing and helping further intensify the innovations of our foreign language teaching.