An Emprirical Research On Formative Assessment In Teaching Of College English Writing

Writing, as a typical language output activity, is a major channel for people to command linguistic knowledge and communicate. In the College English Curriculum Requirements (2004), explicit writing requirements are set for non-English majors. However, there is a big gap between the requirements and students'actual writing ability. In order to solve this problem, a number of common errors committed by students have been summed up and a lot of valuable writing skills have been presented by many linguists. Nevertheless, more attention has been paid to the final products learners write in those researches and the major way adopted is either a product approach or a genre one. The teaching method is employed through students writing practice and then teachers'assessment and feedback. But, presently, it's a general phenomenon that there is a larger number of students in college English class and teachers'workload is strenuous correspondently. Therefore, teachers might not offer timely feedback for each paper to meet students'expectation. Though it's time-consuming, the teaching process is not efficient enough. In light of this, this thesis aims to explore a new teaching model of college English writing from the perspective of formative assessment, under the instruction of constructivism. The new teaching model advocates teacher's guidance as well as students'active participation which can ensure that their different roles are brought into full play.To investigate the effectiveness of this new model in improving students'writing ability, an experiment was carried out among non-English-major sophomores at Hebei Agriculture University. The experimental class was instructed with the student-centered model while the control class was guided by the conventional teaching. Meanwhile, high achiever group and low achiever group were divided in the experimental class. Through horizontal and vertical comparison, quantitative analysis of two questionnaires and two writing tests was conducted with the help of SPSS software. The results of the writing tests show that formative assessment is effective to improve students'writing ability, particularly for low achiever group students. The analysis of two questionnaires further illustrates students in the experimental class have become more interested in English writing and their autonomous study ability has been enhanced greatly. On the other hand, the teacher has a more comprehensive understanding of all students'writing. Reflective teaching is embodied completely.