The Effect Of Formative Assessment On Senior One Students' English Reading Self-efficacy

Nowadays,formative assessment has become an important part of foreign language teaching and learning.It is a process of judging students' interest,attitude,participation and the situation of their language development in the process of learning through various evaluation means and methods.The aim of formative assessment is to provide feedback for every link in the English teaching and to promote teaching and learning by timely adjustment.The New English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(2017)points out that “the diversity and rationality of evaluation methods should be paid more attention to,and formative assessment should be implemented effectively”.The Curriculum Standards also highlights the necessity to build a student-centered teaching philosophy in English language teaching and keep watchful eyes on students' non-intellectual factors such as affective factors and so on.In the meantime,among the previous studies on affective factors,self-efficacy has always been a hot issue in the field of foreign language teaching,which has attracted great attention.Bandura proposes that self-efficacy is specific reflection of emotion,and different people have different self-efficacy in the face of different tasks or activities.English reading self-efficacy is not only the subjective judgment of whether an individual is able to carry out English reading activities but also the concrete expression of self-confidence in this activity.It exerts an influence on the individual's sense of achievement through selection process,cognitive process,motivation process and emotional response.In this study,self-efficacy and formative assessment are put into consideration and investigated together,aiming to answer the two research questions: 1)What is the overall status quo of Senior One students' English reading self-efficacy? 2)Does formative assessment have an effect on Senior One students' English reading self-efficacy? If yes,what are the effects specifically?Quasi-experimental research method was employed in this study,and the research instruments was questionnaire and interview.The research subjects of this study were 125 Senior One students from Shuanghe Middle School in Xuanhan County in Sichuan Province.The author formed the experimental class(EC)versus the control class(CC)and the pretest versus the post-test format.A four-month formative evaluation intervention was conducted in EC.The collected data wereprocessed and analyzed by SPSS 22.0,and combined with the discussion of the interview,the following conclusion was drawn:(1)Senior One students' overall English reading self-efficacy was relatively low and had not reached a moderate level(M=2.471,out of 2.5).To be more specific,the three dimensions of English reading self-efficacy ranked from high to low as follows:“sense of effort”,“Sense of setback challenging”,and “sense of competence”.(2)Based on the results of the independent sample T-test and the paired samples T-test,it was revealed that formative evaluation positively affects Senior One students' English reading self-efficacy after the formative assessment intervention.(3)More specifically,significantly difference were found between “sense of competence” and “sense of setback challenging” in the pre-test and the post-test of the experimental class,which confirmed that formative assessment improved students' English reading self-efficacy and positively influence their “sense of competence” and“sense of setback challenging”.However,no significant difference was identified in terms of “sense of effort”,suggesting this dimension of the reading self-efficacy was not improved.