The Washback And Revelation Of The Writing Test In Middle School's In English Teaching

Language testing is an important approach to evaluate the teaching. Meanwhile, the teaching will decide the basic contents of testing, or it will be ineffective. It is the close relationship between language testing and teaching that makes the washback of testing becomes the common interest of educators, linguists and testers.The education in middle school is based on that in the preliminary school and will be the basis for that in high school and university. In China, the formal foreign language education is started from this stage. Obviously, it must be very crucial among a student's educational experience. In the teaching, teachers must focus on the four basic language skills, namely, listening, speaking, reading and writing. Among them, listening and reading are the major access to language input, while speaking and writing are to language output. Between the last two, writing is agreed to be the most difficult one to acquire and skillful writing must be trained by formal instruction and long-term practice.In response to "The Standards of English Curriculum" prescribed by the Education Ministry and the urgent need to develop the communicative competence, the paper will be dedicated itself to the development of writing skills in middle school. By four questionnaires and interviews respectively to the teachers and students in two middle schools two high schools in Wu Han, it will conduct a research project about the problems in the learning and teaching of writing and the washback of the writing test in the high school entrance examination, aiming at proposing some feasible and effective suggestions for the further teaching and testing.According to the data collected, it has been found that the major weak points facing students learning of wiring are the lack of interest and motivation, the unsolidified linguistic knowledge, the main shortcomings teachers have in their teaching is concerned with their teaching techniques and the evaluation of students' writing, and the problems in writing test are involved in the topic, the requirements and the presenting forms. In respect of the washback of writing test, it has been proved that these tests play washbacks in the learning and teaching. Both the positive and negative washbacks exist, but the positive are far more than the negative.Based on these research results, the paper proposes some suggestions for the teaching and writing test in the middle schools, so as to expand the negative washbacks and eliminate the negative. For teachers, it strongly suggests that they should understand the teaching goal clearly, communicate with students openly, integrate writing with listening, reading and speaking, increase the instruction about grammar, and promote the cooperative study. For testers, they should relate the topic to students' daily life, reduce the writing limits, and diversify the presenting forms.