A Study On The Application Of Formative Assessment In Vocational College English Teaching

Educational evaluation is a crucial section of vocational English teaching. It not only makes for the achievement of curriculum intentions, but also judges the direction of the students’ study. Based on the analysis of the current vocational college students, the author points out that the existing evaluation methods are one-dimensional assessment for vocational college students and through the questionnaire survey the author proves that many students don’t like the existing evaluation methods. The author advocates formative assessment should be used for English teaching in Vocational Colleges. In the past education evaluation, too much emphasis was given to the relative evaluation standard and the general trend. The development of personality and individual differences is ignored. There is lack of overall understanding on the significance of learning evaluation. Formative assessment pays attention to the cultivation of innovative consciousness, practical ability, learning strategies, such as the evaluation of people oriented ideas. Through the questionnaire survey of three vocational colleges in Linfen city, the author of this thesis found that Vocational English teaching evaluation process does have a lot of problems.In Vocational English Teaching, evaluation pays more attention to language knowledge and foreign language skills for examination but pays very little attention to students learning attitudes, strategies and cultural consciousness. The test brings a lot of anxiety and depression/uneasiness to the students and influences the all-round development of the students and improvement of the teaching level. It can improve the students’ learning and teachers’ teaching abilities. Based on some theoretical research of formative assessment, this thesis aims to encourage teachers to participate in the assessment reform.According to the basic theory of formative evaluation, the author through experiment wants to prove the following research questions: formative evaluation is superior to the traditional single evaluation methods, and it should become an important part in the process of Vocational English teaching.1. Formative assessment can arouse students’ interest in learning, correct their English learning attitude, increase their sense of self-achievement, and develop selfconfidence especially poor students.2. The purposes of this article are to motivate teachers and enable them to involve themselves into the evaluation reform. This article emphasizes the need for teachers to know what formative assessment really means to their students in teaching process, the need for teachers to use a variety of techniques of alternative assessment effectively, especially non-threatening informal techniques.3. Through the experiment in vocational colleges the author tries to prove that formative assessment will help to improve the effect of classroom teaching and will help to improve the overall level of learning.4. Through the Experiments the author tries to show that the results of the formative evaluation and summative evaluation are consistent. Hence it is necessary to adopt formative evaluation in vocational colleges.Through experiment, the author confirmed the first hypothesis by the comparing the results of interest survey before and after the experiment. Through four different classroom observations and comparing the changes of four different observations, the author confirmed the second hypotheses. Through pre-test and post-test comparison of the results, the author confirmed the third and fourth hypotheses. The author finally draws the conclusion: Formative evaluation is better than the traditional single assessment methods, and it should be the most important part in the process of English teaching in Vocational Colleges.This dissertation is composed of two parts. As far as the author’s concerned, the first section is the theory part. Theory part accounts for the research background, domestic and foreign research dynamics and some basic theoretical knowledge. It lays a good foundation for the depth study of the research. The second part is experiment part and the core part of this paper. On the basis of previous studies, in accordance with the new standards, the author of this thesis carried out the experiment in Class13106 and Class13107 in Lin Fen Vocational and Technical College and the test data were fully analyzed. The experimental results confirmed that formative evaluation is better than the traditional single assessment methods, and it should be the most important part in the process of English teaching in Vocational Colleges.