An Action Research On The Enhancement Of Junior Students' English Core Word Productive Competence Through Formative Assessment

Vocabulary is the foundation of English study. It is argued that vocabulary acquisition makes a contribution to the development of communicative competence. However, it is reported that many junior students lack the vocabulary competence required for speaking and writing and some of them show low self-efficacy towards vocabulary learning.Formative assessment with humanism and constructivism as the backbone is an ongoing assessment process that provides students and teachers with feedback on students' mastery of standards to help teachers make useful instructional decisions. In this sense, formative assessment is intended to enhance student learning. Thus, it can enhance students' vocabulary competence in theory. This study aims at helping junior students to improve their vocabulary competence by integrating formative assessment into their language learning, with the hope that the progress and achievement may increase their self-efficacy. An eight-week action research was carried out with the application of formative assessment on students' performance, level and progress in speaking activities and writing tasks about core words. With feedback provided by formative assessment, both teachers and students are informed about the gap between students' vocabulary competence at a point and targeted goals, in this way, timely adjustments can be made to close the gap. These adjustments help to ensure students achieve targeted learning goals. Data was gathered by means of interviews, questionnaire and tests. The results obtained in this study revealed that the ongoing formative assessment enabled students to get constant feedback through self-assessment, peer assessment and teacher assessment and thus continuously adjust and improve their own vocabulary learning. The research comes to the conclusion that formative assessment is helpful in enhancing students' core word productive competence and can motivate students' self-efficacy.