| Self-assessment is defined as "the involvement of learners in making judgments about their own learning, particularly about their achievements and the outcomes of their learning"(Boud&Falchikov,1989, p.529). There has been an upsurge in the interest in self-assessment in the past few decades as the appeal for learner autonomy and assessment for learning as well as assessment as learning grows higher. Abundant research has been conducted at home and abroad, and meaningful results have been obtained. However, most research about self-assessment is quantitative research. In this type of research, students’self-assessment results are collected and compared with teachers’assessment results, hoping to check whether students can assess their work accurately. Few studies concentrating on the process of self-assessment have been carried out. In fact, some researchers stated that the whole self-assessment process should be explored. Therefore, it’s necessary to investigate the process of student’s self-assessment. The present study was designed to describe the self-assessment process of a junior English major student during an argumentative writing task, and find out the factors influencing her self-assessment process. The framework of Wei&Chen (2003) is adopted as the research framework prototype of the present research. In this framework, four factors are proved to be able to contribute to the implementation of self-assessment in L2writing. The findings of the study are expected to answer the following two research questions:1. What was the self-assessment process like during the argumentative writing task?2. What factors influenced the self-assessment process?The research employed a qualitative research method and lasted for eleven weeks. One English-major student was selected as the subject of the research. During the research semi-structured interviews were carried out every week in order to investigate the process of the subject’s self-assessment. After the research, some findings have been yielded: 1. During the argumentative writing task, the self-assessment process of the subject fluctuated constantly. At first she couldn’t assess her essay accurately, but later under the influence of some factors such as teacher assessment, peer assessment, etc., she began to assess her essay more sensibly and accurately. And her final self-assessment mainly followed the comments given by the teacher.2. Six factors which have an influence on the self-assessment process of the subject have been discovered, namely task knowledge, model essay, prior writing knowledge, scoring rubric, teacher assessment and peer assessment. Among those factors, teacher assessment plays the most crucial role in the self-assessment process of the subject.According to the major findings of the research, several implications are provided from theoretical, methodological, and practical perspectives. Based on the limitations of the research, recommendations for future research are addressed at last. |
