| English vocabulary teaching is not only the basis of English teaching, but also a veryimportant part of high school English teaching. Its effectiveness is directly related to students’competence of the English language and of decisive importance to English teaching. However,the English vocabulary classroom teaching of our country still leaves much to be desired atpresent, such as the singleness and inefficiency of the teaching assessment, and teachingcontents are disconnected from the real-world application. Therefore, the study, from theperspective of teaching assessment of high school vocabulary teaching, implementedperformance-based assessment into traditional cramming vocabulary teaching classroom toexplore an innovational vocabulary teaching method. It also means to promote high schoolvocabulary teaching through using performance-based assessment. The aim of this study is toprovide a valuable reference for high school vocabulary teaching of our country.Performance-based assessment was first proposed and became popular in the USA in the90s of the20thcentury, and has been widely used in the basic education abroad and at homesince then. Performance-based assessment approaches mainly aim at making students actuallycomplete one or a series of tasks during the teaching process, and teachers could giveassessment according to students’ performance and completion outcome in the tasks.This study was guided by constructivism and Flavell’s meta-cognitive theory. The authormade the practical study of performance-based assessment and vocabulary teaching in theschool where she undertook her educational practicum. From September in2013to January in2014, the author made the experiment between Class8, Grade1(the Experimental Class) andClass7, Grade1(the Control Class) in Panjin No.2Senior Middle School, Liaoning Province,with the total number of96students as participants. The experiment was designed to discusswhether performance-based assessment can promote high school vocabulary teaching throughimplementing different vocabulary teaching methods and teaching activities in the two classes.Firstly, the author designed a pretest questionnaire about students’ vocabulary learninginterest, learning method and vocabulary teaching effectiveness to collect basic informationand get ready for next research. Then the author gave interviews to three teachers to know thepresent vocabulary teaching method and evaluating method. According to the results of theinterviews, cramming teaching is still the most commonly used vocabulary teaching method,and teachers were accustomed to using summative assessment to check teaching effectiveness.On the basis of above data, the author analyzed and summed up the strategies, experience andmatters needing attention when implementing performance-based assessment to promote highschool vocabulary teaching. Three conclusions were drawn from the study. The first one is that compared with theControl Class, the students in the Experimental Class gained great progress in vocabularylearning interest and level attained. With the improvement in vocabulary study, more andmore students in the Experimental Class gained high marks in English and retrieved theirlearning confidence. The second conclusion is that it can be sure that performance-basedassessment is not only a way of assessing students’ learning, but also an auxiliary means tostudents’ vocabulary learning. The last one is that performance-based assessment can beapplied in vocabulary classroom teaching appropriately. But its application must be alignedwith the English teaching situation in our country.At last, it is important to note that because of the small sample size, and the shortexperiment time devoted in this study, the reliability and validity of the assessment might beimperfect. What’s more, the effectiveness of the assessment in vocabulary teaching andlearning in high school needs to be studied further. |
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