The Application Of Rubrics In Senior High School English Process Writing

Writing,as one of the basic English learning skills,plays an important role in English teaching.However,influenced by traditional teaching patterns,most teachers has still followed the single teaching method of “Teachers assign the composition-Students write the composition-Teachers correct the composition”.They usually correct the passage after class and make comments at class.During the whole teaching process,teachers are always in the dominant position and students always play a passive role.They usually listen to teachers’ comments and then just put the composition aside without further referring to it.In their compositions,the same mistakes often occur and students’ writing ability hasn’t been improved.Furthermore,when correcting the composition,teachers usually pay much attention to the mistakes of grammar and vocabulary.It takes teachers a lot of time and energy to correct the composition and find the mistakes of the passage but students don’t pay enough attention to them.During the process of correction,teachers are subjective and they are short of a detailed evaluation standards.With the reform of National English Curriculum Standards,there is a shift of focus of assessing writing from product to process and from distinguishing or categorizing students to developing their potentials.National English Curriculum Standards(2017)has put forward a higher standard of evaluation.It suggests that formative evaluation should be incorporated with summative assessment and it lays stress on the evaluation’s role of promoting learning.It stresses that students should learn to monitor and adjust their learning objectives,learning styles and learning process.Providing formative evaluation during teaching is an effective way to help students learn from evaluation.As the main participants of evaluation process,students should learn to use proper ways of evaluation and take an active part in evaluation to find and analyze the specific problems during study.Writing rubrics provide an objective evaluation tool for students to conducteffective self-evaluation,mutual evaluation and group evaluation in writing.This study designs a rubric suitable for evaluating senior three students’ English composition based on 6+1 traits writing rubrics,scoring criteria given in the National Unified Examination Outline for Admission to Colleges and Universities in 2020,Luo Xiaojie’s eight-dimensional writing rubric and Zhu Dongyang’s writing rubric.To improve students’ writing skill,rubric is used to instruct students how to write,to modify and assess their work in terms of five aspects,including spelling &punctuation,contents,sentence structures,vocabulary,and text organization.Students are required to write the advantages and disadvantages of the evaluated compositions and suggestions for improvement after each dimension of the rubric,in order to improve students’ ability to assess the compositions and to have language input during the analysis.The author conducted an one-term empirical study on the application of this writing rubric in the teaching of English process writing in the senior students of Datong No.2 Middle School.During the teaching of process writing,the control class isn’t provided with rubric while the experimental class is provided.After a semester of teaching,the students in the experimental class and the control class have obvious differences in the total score of composition,the content of the text,sentence structures,vocabulary,text organization and spelling &punctuation.Most students have improvements by one or tow levels.The analysis shows that by using rubrics,students are made clearer about the scoring standards before writing.For teachers,on the other hand,rubrics prove an effective tool,enabling them to assess more students’ compositions within limited time and to give more timely,detailed and accountable feedback.This study proves the effectiveness of using this writing rubric in the teaching of process writing and proves the positive attitude students have towards rubrics,making a positive exploration of the function of evaluating the rubric to promote learning.