A Survey Of Formative Assessment In English Writing For Senior High Fine Arts Students

Fine Arts students are known as poor English learner because they are weak in basics,inactive in learning, unconscious of self-discipline. What’s worse, they have to spend muchtime in training their drawing skills. Another big disadvantage is that they have to learn in abig class, where students with different levels have to face the same teacher. From the aboveanalysis, it is difficult for the fine arts students to improve their English only by following theteacher. So the writer here is attempting to apply some methods of Formative Assessment tohelp improve the writing ability for Fine Arts students. In the paper, the writer has adopted thefollowing methods: self/peer-learning, self/peer-assessing, portfolios, etc.After a period ofpractice, the author made an interview and gave a test to check the effects. It is found thatmost of the learners’ writing ability improved a lot. In addition, the methods listed above havea positive effect on their learning attitude, autonomy awareness, life-learning awareness, aswell as organizing ability. Meanwhile, the writer put forward the disadvantages that hold backthe application of the Formative Assessment: the great differences in the learners’ Englishlevel; the learners’ broken time that is against the continuous process of FormativeAssessment; heavy burden to the teachers. Anyhow, Formative Assessment plays a positiverole in bettering the learners’ interest, capacity as well as the teaching efficiency.