A Study Of The Effectiveness Of Peer-assessment And Self-assessment On English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

Regarding the English learning in high school,writing is an important language skill for students—so that how to strengthen students’ English writing ability and improve the teaching methods of English writing are the hot topics which many researchers pay much attention to.Writing assessment,as an important part in the teaching of English writing,directly affects the effectiveness of the teaching of English writing and the improvement of students’ writing ability.Teaching assessment,which has been used in the teaching of writing in senior high school for a long time in our country,dampens the students’ writing enthusiasm and initiative for that assessment has a fixed teaching process.However,the Process Approach is advocated in foreign language teaching,and furthermore,the ideas of students being the center of teaching and improving students’ subjectivity are promoted,so lot of educators begin to change the mode of writing teaching and explore new comprehensive assessment method.On the basis of the Process Approach,the Constructivism theory and the metacognition theory,the author introduces the methods of peer-assessment and self-assessment into English writing teaching in senior high school with her teaching experience and carries out a three-month empirical study during which the following questions are going to be studied:(1)What are the students’ opinions on English writing,their own problems in English writing and current writing assessment methods?(2)What are the students and teachers’ attitudes towards the combination mode of peer-assessment and self-assessment?(3)What are the effects of peer-assessment and self-assessment onto students’ English writing ability and can it be used in senior high school writing teaching?In order to solve those three questions,two classes in Grade 12 in Affiliated Experimental Middle School of Huaibei Normal University are taken as the subjects of the experiment.One is designated as the experimental class and the other as the controlled class and research method is mainly a combination of qualitative and quantitative.The contrast experiment is employed to discuss the above three questions.The experimental class adopts the combination mode of peer-assessment and self-assessment while the controlled class adopts the traditional assessment mode—teacher assessment.The research instruments include questionnaires,measurable tables,writing tests and interview.The result shows that(1)students lack interests and confidence in English writing,and they think that it is limited for the improvement of their English writing ability to only use teacher assessment method;(2)students,especially the top students,are generally fond of the combination mode of peer-assessment and self-assessment;(3)the combination mode of peer-assessment and self-assessment enables students to improve their writing ability and interests,and it is also a good complement to teacher assessment.Based on the above research and findings,it is convincing that although the application of the combination mode of peer-assessment and self-assessment has difficulties to some extent,it has the positive effects on the improvement of English writing ability and educational practices.