| Assessment plays an important role in English teaching. At presentthere exist two forms of assessment systems: formative and summativeassessments. Summative assessment is periodic evaluation, the other isformative assessment. At present, in most schools of China in our dailyteaching, summative assessment is still regarded as the most common wayto assess students, which is obviously not fair enough and suitable for somestudents and also not good for their future development. Especially for someacademically poor students, because they are less likely to score good marksin examinations even though they work very hard.Compared with formative assessment, summative assessment mainlydepends on examinations, taking the forms of tests. Schools and teacherstend to judge a student mainly by his or her grades or achievement in theexaminations, which is especially not suitable for some students especiallyfor the ones in some academically low-level classes. Because students’achievements in examinations can only reflect their ability in languagelearning, rather than other aspects. According to the new EnglishCurriculum Standards (ECS) published in2001， apart from languageknowledge and skills, learning strategies, attitudes and culturalconsciousness etc. should be developed and tested.Besides, summative assessment ignores the diagnosing and reflectingfunctions of assessment. Examination results are almost the only standard tomeasure students’ achievements in summative assessment system. This kindof assessment is only suitable for a small number of academically goodstudents. For other more students, who can not do very well in theexaminations, this kind of assessment will discourage and depress them by ranking them in all kinds of examinations. As a result, facing the low grades,they will even lose heart in learning English and give it up eventually.Thirdly, summative assessment neglects exploiting the students’potentials. The contents in the exams are designed not suitable for everyindividual.So it doesn’t work well in serving some students’ growth andfuture development.Fourthly, summative assessments are mainly carried out by teachers.Students and parents have few chances to participate in the assessmentactivities. As a result, students are blind about their performances and parentscan’t play their roles in the course of the assessment.Fifthly, according to the traditional assessment system, differentcharacteristics of individual student are not paid more attention to.Sixthly, examinations often lead to students’ tension and anxiety. It isespecially true if this examination is of great importance to students, such as,mid-term examinations, final examinations and National EntranceExaminations. The anxiety resulting from the exams potentially does harm tothe students’ physical and mental growth and even influence their future.In conclusion, in the traditional assessment system, teachers, as well asstudents have great pressure of scoring high marks in the examinations.Teachers have to take great troubles to find out the most effective way ofcoping with exams. Meanwhile, students always cram for the examinationand they always pay much attention to how to get high scores in the exams.As a consequence, the students naturally become examination machines, whodon’t study actively. Obviously, summative assessment is becoming more andmore limited in assessing students. Furthermore, it goes against the“humanistic concept†of new curriculum and hold back the development ofcurriculum reform，while, formative assessment, which focuses on students’learning process, is being developed rapidly nowadays and be accepted bymore and more middle school teachers, however, the existing problem is how to make formative assessments more effectively. Therefore, there is adesperate need to do some research into the approaches to doing formativeassessment. |
