An Empirical Study Of The Impact Of Formative Assessment On Higher Vocational College Students' English Reading Self-efficacy

Reading is an essential part of English learning for higher vocational students and is one of the important English skills.However,in today's vocational English reading,many students fear English reading.They have low interest,no enough enthusiasm,no clear motivation.What's worse,they are unwilling to make efforts on English reading Thus,the reading efficacy is low and reading performance is not satisfactory at all.Self-efficacy is an important emotional experience in the process of English reading,which is closely related to the evaluation methods in the teaching process."Basic Requirements for Teaching English Courses in HigherVocational Education" made by Ministry of Education emphasizes that the formative assessment is a process evaluations to promote the development of curriculum.Its evaluation methods and means are of great variety,providing timely and targeted feedback to teachers and students.Therefore,it is helpful for teachers to understand the difficulties or problems of students in the process of reading;It is also helpful for students to reflect and summarize their English reading behavior and make more objective and realistic judgment on their reading ability.The purpose of this thesis is to explore the impact of formative evaluation on English reading efficacy of vocational college students.This study uses qualitative and quantitative methods to carry out research.Qualitative research includes literature,classroom observation and interview.Quantitative research contains questionnaires,tests and experimental methods.The thesis mainly studies the following two questions:First,can formative assessment improve English reading self-efficacy of higher vocational college students?Second,can formative assessment improve English reading achievement of higher vocational college students?This study is based on 60 students from two parallel classes,who major in news editing in Wuhan International Tade College.The experiment began in March 2017 and ended in June 2017 with a total of 4 months.Before the experiment,the results of both the questionnaire and English reading proficiency test showed that the reading efficacy and reading achievement in the two classes were almost the same.The English reading class in the experimental class adopts the formative evaluation,that is to say,the teacher evaluation,the student self-evaluation,the peer evaluation and the collaborative evaluation are synthetically used.The students are required to make the standard potofolios,fill in the reading log and so on.At the same time,teachers must do a good job in class observation.English reading teaching in the control class uses the traditional summative evaluation.Reading materials and teachers are the same with experimental classes.After the experiment,the students in the two classes filled out the questionnaire again and completed the English reading proficiency test.In addition,the author also randomly interviewed some students in the experimental class.This study used SPSS 19.0 to analyze the data collected from the questionnaires and tests.Results and related analysis proved the following conclusions:First,formative evaluation can indeed enhance the English reading efficacy of higher vocational students.Second,formative evaluation can indeed improve the English reading performance of vocational students.Finally,the writer pointed out the limitations of this study,and put forward some suggestions on English reading teaching in higher vocational colleges.