The Application Of Formative Assessment In English Writing Teaching For Senior High School Students

It is well acknowledged that writing is an essential part of language competence. However, mostsenior high school students’writing competence is very weak and most students have difficulties in writingEnglish compositions. Thus, it is urgent to improve students’ writing skills. Currently, most teachingapproach for English writing in senior high schools is still the traditional product approach whichemphasizes writing as a final product instead of a process which consists of different stages. Thistraditional teaching method proves to be not very effective because it cannot evoke students’ learningautonomy and students lose their interest and confidence in writing under this teaching approach. Goodassessment can contribute to effective teaching and successful learning. Chinese Ministry of Educationpromulgated the English Curriculum for Senior High School in2003, which advises a teaching emphasison the process of learning and advocates formative way to assess the performance of the students in thewriting process. Then, formative assessment has been widely applied in senior high school. This researchtries to find an effective way to assess students’ English writing. It has been designed to conduct anexperimental method to examine whether the formative assessment is more effective than the traditionalassessment method in changing students’ attitudes, improving their strategies and promoting theirproficiency in English writing in senior high school.117students of two classes of Grade2from Qin An NO.2Senior High School were chosen as thesubjects of the experiment. The instruments applied in the experiment are questionnaires and paper tests.Summative assessment is used in the control class while formative assessment is used in experimental class.The outcome of the experiment shows that students’ attitudes toward English writing have changed, theirself-reflection has been strengthened and their writing proficiency has been improved after theexperiment.The thesis is composed of six chapters. Chapter1introduces the background, objectives, significanceand the structure of the thesis. Chapter2is literature review. Chapter3states the theoretical frameworkof formative assessment. Chapter4reports research design. Results and discussion are given in the fifthchapter. Chapter6draws a conclusion of the present study. The major findings of the study are reportedfirstly and then some implications are given to teachers. Finally the limitations of the study andsuggestions for future research are pointed out.