An Experimental Study Of The Formative Assessment In Teaching Of English Reading In Senior High Schools

For a long time, summative assessment is the main way to assess students. However, with the progress of education reform, a lot of educators realize that summative assessment has many disadvantages. The New English Curriculum in 2001 pointed out that “In English teaching process, formative assessment should be used as the main assessment. English teaching should focus on training students’ active learning and build up students’ learning confidence.” However, there are few researches on formative assessment application in English reading teaching. The author tried to put formative assessment into English reading teaching.There are five chapters all together. Chapter One is an general introduction of the thesis.In Chapter Two, it first defines the definition of formative assessment, characteristics, tools and then explains the relevant theories of the research home and abroad. In Chapter Three, it gives the whole experiment with assessment instruction and standards; besides, the author collects and analyzes the data. Chapter Four, based on the previous discussion, two hypotheses are put forwarded: the application of formative assessment in current English reading teaching and the effect of formative assessment on students’ English reading ability. In the last chapter, conclusion, limitation and implication are given.The study is through 74 C-level students in the author’s school on how to use formative assessment to improve students’ reading ability. The experiment includes questionnaires about the situation of students’ English reading, about the application of formative assessment among teachers. Furthermore, the author used SPSS to analyze the data, which shows that students’ English reading is not good, and teachers need improvement about the application of formative assessment. Under this condition, the author applies some measures about formative assessment, such as classroom observation, portfolios, etc. to conduct an experiment for one semester(from 2014-9 to 2015-1), in order to study the relationship between formative assessment and improvement of students’ reading ability.Through the comparison between pre-test score and post-test score, it can easily tell that formative assessment could greatly improve students’ English reading ability.