An Empirical Study On The Backwash Of Formative Assessment To Learner Autonomy In Senior High School

In recent years, with the reform of curriculum, formative assessment and autonomous learning have become the buzzwords and significant focuses in the filed of study in foreign language learning and teaching.As we know, the most important duty of teachers is to teach their students how to acquire knowledge, but not just to impart the knowledge. Just as the old saying goes, give a man a fish, and you have fed him for today; teach a man to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime. The theory of learner autonomy is based on this ideology. Autonomous learning is also called self-regulated learning, self-directed learning and independent learning and so on, which mainly means that learners actively and relatively independently carry out their own learning by setting the learning goals, choosing learning contents, making out learning plans, selecting learning strategies, monitoring, evaluating their learning process and doing some reflections on their own losses and gains.Moreover, we also witness another change with the educational reform, which is that our teaching focus has shifted from "teacher-centered" model to "learner-centered" model, with the implementation of formative assessment in educational assessing system. For an English teacher, the most important thing is to help students form the good habits of learning by themselves and know what to learn and how to learn, rather than only ask them to obey all the orders and instructions. In other words, it is not only the requirement of lifelong education to cultivate senior high school students’capacity of learning autonomy, but also the requirement of sustainable development. After several decades’development and evolution in education system, many scholars in China began to shift their attention to the relationship between formative assessment and leaner autonomy. However, most of the influential and significant studies lay more emphasis on the effect on college students, and seldom advocate the importance of fostering high school students’ ability of autonomous learning by implementing formative assessment. To be precise, there are still not enough evidences showing formative assessment’s positive backwash in senior high students’autonomy.The purpose of this thesis is to prove the positive backwash of formative assessment on learner autonomy by finding out the internal connection between formative assessment and learner autonomy and fostering the capacity of learners’ self-assessment. This research is based on a half year’s teaching practice in Chengdu No.3Middle School, including84senior2participants (44from experimental class,40from controlled class). As measuring tools, questionnaire, interview, and portfolio were used to collect data. And then, both quantitative and qualitative research approaches are used to analyze the data. Finally, the data results show that the effective implementation of formative assessment in senior high school can exert positive backwash on learners’ ability of autonomous learning. It is hoped that this research can be helpful to related studies in this field.