An Investigative Study On English Teachers’ Formative Assessment Strategies In Rural Primary Schools

With the continuous development of the reform of English teaching, the teaching evaluation has been paid more and more attention to the field of education. A comprehensive, objective and scientific evaluation system is essential to the realization of curriculum objectives. Teaching evaluation includes summative assessment and formative assessment. Since the 1970 s, more and more educators and researchers have realized that the final evaluation could not provide comprehensive and accurate information to describe students’ learning behavior, abilities,development and so on, which not only hit a lot of students’ interest and initiative in English learning but also ignore the emotional factors of students’ learning English,and it also does no good to English teaching in primary schools. At the same time, the educational circles generally believe that formative assessment can provide timely and effective feedback to teachers. It is beneficial to the teachers to adjust the teaching activity to promote the realization of the teaching aims.Formative assessment of primary school English teaching is also known as English teaching process evaluation. Its purpose is not to select a small number of outstanding students, but to find each student’s potential for learning English,encourage independent learning, provide feedback for English teaching and promote the effect of summative assessment, especially to stimulate students’ interest in learning English, develop students’ good learning habits, help students form good healthy personalities and consolidate a solid foundation for students to continue learning English and even life-long learning.The author summarizes the basic situation, characteristics, strategies and implementation principles of formative assessment by reading a large number of domestic and foreign books, periodicals and gets the main strategies of formative assessment and the author also chooses the teachers work in rural primary schools in Fengning County in Hebei as research subjects and hands out questionnaires to them.Combined with interviews with teachers in this region, the author gets the readers toknow whether the teachers in this area know about formative assessment or even use these strategies freely in their daily teaching or not. This thesis aims to investigate English teachers’ understanding and use of various formative assessment strategies,help teachers combine formative assessment and summative assessment in the practical work, evaluate students more scientifically, regulate their teaching strategies,and create favorable conditions for students to learn English.