A Study Of Teacher's Feedback And Its Influences On Students' Motivation In L2 Formative Assessment

Recently a paradigm shift has been going on in the field of L2 assessment. It has been advocated by more and more researchers that Formative Assessment (FA) should be served as an alternative to Summative Assessment (SA). Considering teacher's feedback as an essential aspect in FA, this thesis intends to identify the most effective form of teacher's feedback in relation to students'motivation promotion.After describing FA as a framework in which teacher's feedback plays a significant role, the thesis then focuses on teacher's feedback in FA and theoretically analyses the most effective form of teacher's feedback on the basis of the exploration in the definitions, functions and forms of teacher's feedback.Then an experiment was carried out among 196 senior high school students throughout one semester with English curriculum. Participants of the 3 groups were provided with FA and three varied forms of feedback from their English teacher. The study reveals that teacher's feedback plays a significant role in FA while the effort-attributional feedback from language teachers is more effective in promoting L2 learners'motivation than either the ability-attributional feedback or the general feedback.Finally, based on the previous researches and the present writer's empirical studies, several implications on FA and the teacher's feedback are given. First, FA should be appropriately integrated into L2 teaching as an alternative to SA. Second, as a significant aspect of FA, teacher's feedback should be paid enough attention to. As teachers provide more effective feedback, learners should be viewed as the dominant part of FA. Moreover, teacher's effort-attributional feedback is preferred in order to promote learners'motivation.