The Application Of Student Self-assessment Strategy In English Writing In Senior Middle Schools

The English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School has stipulated higher requestfor the students’English competence. This also includes the request for the development ofstudents’English writing ability, which is an essential part of English teaching and acomprehensive reflection of students’language ability. However, in practical teaching, it isnot difficult to find that the students’writing ability relatively lag behind what the standardrequires. The reason for that lies in two aspects. For one thing, it is the unconsciousness ofstudents to practice English writing and a weak awareness to self-correct their own paper. Forthe other, it is due to the lack of systematical and special instruction of writing strategy on thepart of the teacher. Besides, the heavy workload of writing correction sometimes makes theteacher feel unable to ensure the quality. The old teacher-centered assessment system makesteacher the sole judge to students’ability. It stresses both the result and selecting functions ofeducation, while neglecting the process and feelings of the students. Such an assessmentsystem is bound to impede students to have an initiative in learning and lower theirinteresting in writing. The New Curriculum Standard emphasizes students’participation andinteraction. It focuses on the ability of student self-assessment and considers other people’sassessment as a supplement. By this way, a diversified assessment system is built. Meanwhile,the New Curriculum Standard pays more attention to students’learning process and advocatesan assessment system encompassing both dynamic and summative features. This will be sureto make the new system concern the process and feeling of students in learning andencourage them to learn.Student self-assessment is part of a dynamic assessment. It means students themselvesare the main judges in evaluating their own learning process. Self-assessment is helpful instudents’self-awareness, self-control, self-feedback and self-development. Meanwhile，self-assessment can also make up for the deficiency of teacher assessment, help to reducepressure on the teacher, check teaching results, improve teaching methods and enhance theteaching level. The subjects involved in this research were 106 students from two classes in GradeThree, who are from a Senior High Middle school in Zichuan district. The two classes weredivided into two groups. One is an experimental class, which was assigned to acceptself-assessment strategy training both in class and out of class. While the other is a controlclass, where traditional teaching approach was used and no self-assessment training wascarried out. The research data mainly came form two questionnaires, two writing tests,student self-assessment forms and teacher assessment forms. At last, the results of the datashow that: 1) There is no significant difference between the two classes in terms of writingmarks after training, though the experimental class’s writing marks is better than that of thecontrol one. 2) After training, the questionnaire shows the experimental class students have amore positive attitude towards the writing process by using a self-assessment strategy. Thestudents’interests and confidence in writing has risen significantly. 3) The students wereunable to assess their writing before training, however, after training their self-assessmentability improved significantly.In conclusion, it can be seen that student self-assessment strategy can arouse students’interests in learning. It can also be regarded as an effective mechanism to motivate students toinvolve in writing practice. By combining teacher assessment, student self-assessment andpartner assessment, students will be more aware of their strengths and weakness and have aclear idea of where they should improve in their study. The student self-assessment methodcan also encourage teachers to trust their students, ease off their workload, and increaseefficiency.