An Empirical Study On Formative Assessment In English Writing Class Of Senior High Schools

According to New Curriculum Standard, listening, speaking, reading and writing are thefour basic language skills, among which writing plays an important role. Writing is a kind ofwritten language communication. Besides, it is the important channel for people to master thelanguage knowledge and communicate with each other. Therefore the improvement of theability of English writing must be imperative.However, nowadays, some of the students’ ability of writing is at a very low level, and itcan’t reach the New Curriculum Standard. One of the reasons why the students can’t writewell may be that the English classroom gives the first place to the summative assessment,such as final exams, where the evaluation is short of timeliness and it does not lay stress onthe process of writing, and ignores the students’ study attitude and study strategy.The researcher made an experimental study on the efficiency of formative assessment onthe students’ English writing ability. The study was carried out among the senior II students ina senior high school. Before the experiment, three hypotheses were proposed:(1) FormativeAssessment stimulates the students’ more interest in writing than summative assessment.(2)Formative Assessment is more effective in improving the students’ writing strategy thansummative assessment.(3) Formative assessment can enhance students’ writing ability. Thesubjects were divided into2groups, one is the control group, another the experimental group.The time of the experiment lasted for16weeks, during which the experimental group wasinstructed with the formative assessment, such as self-assessment, peer-assessment, portfolioassessment, and classroom observation in writing class. Portfolio was adopted to record theprocess of the writing of each student. The control group was guided by the conventional wayof evaluation. After the experiment, the researcher gathered the data coming from twoquestionnaires and two tests, and put them into the computer, using SPSS13.0for windows toanalyze. Through the analysis of empirical data, the researcher draws conclusions as follows: First,it is found that the formative assessment is more effective to enhance the students’ interest inwriting. Second, formative assessment is more effective to improve the students’ writingstrategy. Third, formative assessment is more effective to improve the students’ writing ability.Based on these findings, the researchers put forward two constructive suggestions in the end.To start with, teachers are supposed to diverse the formative assessment in classroom teaching,such as self-assessment, group-assessment, and incentive assessment. Second, the teachersshould create an open and fair evaluation system to combine inside and outside classroomevaluation. The teachers give timely feedback and praise to the students on their studymethods and attitudes. In the end of the paper, the researcher also puts forward somelimitations of the study, such as the limited experimental subjects and limited time. However,this paper does make some contributions to further study in the study of formative assessment.