The Application Of Formative Assessment In English Teaching In Senior High Schools

Education evaluation is one of the three major subjects of modern education andresearch and also one of the most significant criterions to assess the performance intheir teaching and learning. Actually, our related teaching and learning activities areall decided by it. Our final aim is to make our students develop healthily and havethem be excellent. Therefore, to what degree do the students develop or whether theylive up to our expectations in school naturally becomes the matter we most care about.However, from ancient times till today, influenced by the traditional concepts, we stillsee students from such aspects as how many grade they got in the exams, hat issummative evaluation. In brief, we judge students from their marks in mid-term orfinal exams or whether they are admitted by senior high schools or colleges oruniversities. This way in which we evaluate students by the marks from certain examcauses most students lose interest in English and the passion for learning English.When asked the reason for learning English, they usually answer that they just want toget high mars and then go to universities. Thus, most of them learn to analyze themembers of sentences, recite the language points, translate the passage word by word,memorize new words mechanically and recite the passage mechanically. In the end,they can’t speak English fluently, not to mention, use it in life.With the General High Middle School English Course Criteria (Trial Edition)carried out, evaluation system which is applied to the quality education should beestablished.According to the General High Middle School English Course Criteria(Trial Edition),“teachers should promote the combination of summative evaluationand formative evaluation and attach importance to the learning process as well as thefinal result. And evaluation should be primarily formative；” Based on the writer’sown teaching practice the writer explores how to carry out formative assessment inclassroom English teaching at Senior High School and aims to explore how theevaluation has an effect on English teaching and learning and what the attitude ofstudents towards this kind of evaluation. Meanwhile, this thesis tries to test whetherstudents’ learning interest and attitude towards English are improved and their language proficiency is promoted. Therefore, the writer chooses her own two classesas the subjects and one is the experimental class and the other is the controlled class.They are all exposed to about20weeks English classes with the same learningmaterials, that is, the text books published by Foreign Language Teaching andResearch Press. In the research, the experimental class is assessed with the traditionalway, that is, summative assessment.As is seen from the experimental research, formative assessment promotesstudents’ learning interest and attitude, and therefore, improves the languageproficiency in English. And through the questionnaire survey, we can see the studentsin the experimental class are fond of this kind of evaluation. However, formativeassessment also has some difficulties, such as the opening is difficult to form a unifiedevaluation standards and evaluation whether can achieve the objective evaluation isalso a problem. Finally, this paper presents some feasible advice and the limitations ofthis study reflection.