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

As an indispensable component of teaching program, an effective assessment system can not only improve learning and help students establish framework of pronunciation learning, but also enable teachers to monitor students’ learning process so as to adjust teaching activities to it. Currently in domestic, teachers and colleges are still tended to employ summative assessment methods like final exams at the end of semester. There are some attempts of inviting some tools of formative assessment into college English teaching classes, mostly in reading and writing. Based on analysis of practical experience of Pronunciation Teaching Team in our university, this thesis endeavors to apply systematic formative assessment in the course of pronunciation of English majors, and prove the effectiveness of this system by conducting an experiment.The author chose four classes from English majors in East China Normal University as subjects, with two classes as Experimental Group and the other two as Controlled Group. During the implementation for one semester, the author employed formative assessment for Experimental Group such as pre-, mid- and post-test, records of learning development, questionnaires and interview, mobile phone chatting groups and close contact with teachers, while Controlled Group adopted summative assessment. In previous formative assessment practice, a lot of workloads are added to teachers and students. In this experiment, the author invited students from higher grades as teaching assistants to share the workload and also to personalize the instructions given to students. Their working contents include recordings from the tests, after-class tutoring, and keeping records of students’ learning development, answering students’ questions timely. They also work as examples in the zone of proximal development since they are excellent learners themselves, and they are more familiar with obstacles of learning pronunciation and are able to offer useful solutions. At last, the author processed the collected data with SPSS in order to explore whether formative assessment has positive effects on students learning pronunciation.The results of this experiment shows that by learning the course of phonetics for one semester, both Experimental Group and Controlled Group have improved the proficiency of pronunciation, while the improvement of Experimental Group is greater than that of Controlled Group. Meanwhile, the students of lower proficiency benefit more from the system of formative assessment compared with students of higher proficiency. What’s more, the data from questionnaires and interview demonstrate that formative assessment can also promote the cultivation of positive learning motivation, learning attitudes and learning strategies.