A Study Of The Washback Of Formative Assessment On Oral English Learning Of College Students

Oral English course is the important content of college English teaching. It has great significance to cultivate students’ ability of using English. Summative assessment and formative assessment are two main evaluation methods which are used in foreign language teaching in China. For a long period, the foreign language teachers usually adopt the summative assessment in the process of teaching.Summative assessment is usually conducted at the end of the teaching activities. It mainly gives scores or judgments about the students’ learning through the forms of final exams. However, summative assessment ignores to make assessments on the students’ whole learning process as well as to monitor the students’ learning process.The emergence of the formative assessment provides a suggested solution of the problem with certain reference significance. In recent years, the studies of formative assessment have gradually increased in the field of foreign language curriculum. The studies emphasize on the application of formative assessment, the relationship between formative assessment and the reform of foreign language teaching, as well as the relationship between formative assessment and students’ language learning ability.Although the domestic studies of formative assessment have made some achievements, mostly concerned on the application of formative assessment in the primary and secondary school teaching as well as the college English majors oral teaching, and non-English majors’ writing research. However, the study of formative assessment on oral English learning of college students is rare.This thesis intends to investigate the washback of formative assessment on oral English learning of college students, so as to analyze the positive washback and negative washback of applying formative assessment on oral English learning ofcollege students.This research adopts the empirical research methods, including testing,questionnaires and classroom observation. These three methods can complement each other, support each other, multi-angle inspection and improve the quality of the research. This study selected 30 non-English major sophomores as the research subjects, to carry out an empirical study of oral English learning for 16 weeks. The author has firstly conducted two tests, which are based on the oral test papers of Public English Test System of level 3, and then conducts two questionnaires and classroom observation in the study. Finally, the author has collected the data by analyzing these data results and makes a conclusion. The statistical methods used in this thesis are descriptive analysis and student’s t test.The results show that there are both positive washback and negative washback on oral English learning of college students after applying the formative assessment.However, in general there are much more positive washback than negative washback by applying formative assessment into oral English learning of college students. The positive washback is that formative assessment is helpful to improve the students’ ability of spoken English. Besides it also does great help to promote the students’ oral learning and autonomous learning. Moreover, most of the students show positive attitudes towards formative assessment on college students’ oral English learning.However, there are some negative washback in the study. Under the study of formative assessment in oral practice, some of the students merely practice oral English speeches through the outline type in order to get good grades. The content and form of their speeches are lack of creativity. Ultimately it has affects on purpose of cultivating the students’ comprehensive ability of using English to communicate.Therefore, how to make much better use of formative assessment on oral English learning of college students and exert its positive washback to improve the students’ speaking ability is still a topic that the researchers need to make further study in the future.