Formative Assessment and Student Success in English as a Second Language Acquisition in Middle School in China

厦门市海沧中学    林文俊

导师：Dr.Dorothy Messerschmitt

University of San Francisco, California, USA

【Abstract】: This study investigates how formative assessment relates to student success in learning English as a second language. In the past, traditional English teaching and assessment in China paid too much attention to summative assessment while ignoring the learning and development of students. Developing an effective learning environment primarily depends on the instructor. It is necessary and important for us to develop a teaching and learning strategy that is helpful for students. In this essay I am going to design research in my ESL classroom on the relationship between formative assessment and ESL acquisitions.

【Key words】: Formative assessment   Second language acquisition

 1.    Statement of the problem

In almost every middle school in China, due to a long history of using tests (or summative assessment) as the only measure in English learning outcome, formative assessment if often ignored. Also, in class instruction, the priority if often given    to assessment of linguistic knowledge rather than the use of the language in communication.

Under the old traditional educational system, a variety of examination evaluations are likely to divide differences and needs of the students, consequently bring harmful influence to the students’ intellectual development. This kind of examination evaluation has usually educated only a handful of successful people, with a large quantity experiencing failure. This fact disobeys the education rules and the regulation of human beings’ development and the rules of equal education.

2.    Purpose of this project

The transition from primary school to middle school life for first-year students is not always smooth. This is partly because of a sudden change in the teaching/learning environment and partly because of exposure to a new social environment. Developing familiarity with new teachers and college takes several weeks. This process may be full of thrills and joy for some students, but cause stress and anxiety for others. Learning new subject matter, meeting deadlines for various assignments and preparing for on-course tests, all add up and cut down learning motivation for first-year students. This situation becomes more stressful if the subject matter has not been well understood in the classroom which normally is the case of too much or too fast. This further adds to students’ frustrations and, as a result, many potentially capable students drop out.

The purpose of this research is to test the relationship between formative assessment and student’s success in ESL acquisition. Should a positive relationship be established between the two, and then formative assessment needs to be used more in ESL classes. Should no relationship or negative relationship show up in the experiment show up in the experiment, and then it needs to be ignored.

3.    Assessment and evaluation

Richards and Nunan (2000) points out that assessment refers to the set of process through which we make judgments about a learner’s level of skills and knowledge, while evaluation focuses on the wider process of collecting and interpreting data in order to make judgments about a particular program or programs. The data we draw on during the evaluation process will usually include not only learner assessment data, but also the other information.(p.62)

“Assessment is usually an ongoing strategy which student learning is not only monitored—a trait shared with testing—but by which students are involved in making decisions about the degree to which their performance matches their ability.” (Hancock, 1994, p.6).

Objective assessments are traditional assessments on which students are expected to provide the one, correct answer. Typical objective assessment formats include multiple choice, true-false, matching, completion, and short answer items. All of these assessments have the potential for good content validity in a minimal amount of time. A major disadvantage of objective test items is that they typically measure only student learning of the knowledge. However, multiple-choice items can be constructed to sample higher cognitive levels (Airasian, 1977).

Hancock (1994) also pointed out that classroom assessment is both a teaching approach and a set of techniques. The approach is that the more you know about what and how students are learning, the better you can plan learning activities to structure your teaching. The techniques are mostly simple, non-graded, anonymous, in-class activities that give useful feedback on the teaching-learning process to both the teacher and the students.

Formative assessment is one important part of assessment. It includes classroom assessment and outside classroom assessment. Classroom assessment has the factors: teacher’s assessment, self-assessment and peer assessment. Parents’ assessment takes place outside the classroom. Formative assessment is carried out during the developmental stages of the teaching program, for the purposes of monitoring the learning process, motivation the learner, revising the materials, altering the teaching program, reconsidering the goal and objective, etc. Teacher assessment plays an important role in formative assessment while self-assessment and cooperative assessment are encouraged (Gao, 2002). Formative evaluation involves “collecting, synthesizing, and interpreting data for the purpose of improving learning or teaching” (Airasian, 1997, p.402). Thus, formative assessment is used to provide feedback and not for grading. It typically occurs while instruction if ongoing. (This can be shown in picture 1)

 Picture 1: English learner and assessment

 Summative assessment is made when a program is fully developed and implemented. Assessment addresses the overall effectiveness of the program. Summative assessment is often in the forms of school-leaving tests, final examinations, etc (Gao, 2002).

Boston (2002) is in favor of formative assessment by mentioning that while many educators are highly focused on state tests, it is important to consider that over the course of a year, teachers can be build in many opportunities to assess how students are learning and then use this information to make beneficial changes in instruction. This diagnostic use of assessment to provide feedback to teachers and students to over the course of instruction is called formative assessment. It stands in contrast to summative assessment, which generally takes place after a period of instruction and requires making a judgment about the learning that has occurred. (e.g., by grading  or scoring a test or paper).

At the Chinese annual academic conference hosted by the Beijing Education and Science Academy, the issue was raised regarding effective and applicable assessment. In China, the assessment of students study outcome has been a practical problem needing research and resolution during the process of reform in foreign language teaching (Gao 2002:203). Mr.Gao mentioned that due to the lack of the research on traditional assessment and the lack of all-round knowledge of student assessment, mistakes have been made and now it’s  time to reconsider assessment and to use appropriate methods. The evaluation of students from middle school and primary school is actually about assessment of learning effectiveness and learning potential. Since the assessment is done on the student, there should be two objects here, one is the student and the other is the evaluator, which in most case, is the teacher. Then they mentions how important formative assessment is because by adding assessment to the process of student’s learning, it can help to identify his or her learning potential, which will be helpful for teachers to improve and develop the student’s learning. (p.34)

As mentioned earlier, peer assessment is a part of formative assessment. Wang, Q (2001) remarked that peer assessment could be a powerful way of formatively assessing students. It can motivate them because they will be receiving feedback from their peer(s); and it can provide effective feedback quickly and time—efficiently. Gao (2002) especially highlights that students should need to know what they’ve done wrong, or poorly, or whether they have performed in some other way, which is inappropriate within the subject. And they should need to know in what respects their work was wrong or poor or inappropriate. They also need suggestion on ways in which it could have been correct or better. (p.35)

To some extent, I believe it is quite important to educate students to become better learners, or lifelong learners rather than the knowledge receiver, then the ability to self-assess accurately and self-assessment will become to a crucial competence for students to develop.

Hypothesis

We all know that English teaching and learning is a difficult task, varying from student to student and teacher to teacher. It also depends on the teaching style of the instructor. The traditional mode of assessment in Xiamen is likely to cut down students’ interest in English learning. Moreover, students do not enjoy such learning practices because they do not create any motivation to learn; instead they result in confusion and thus hinder second language acquisition.

We should try our best to develop an optimal effective teaching learning strategy that is suitable for the entire class of varying abilities through adding assessment in the classroom. A carefully designed pre-test questionnaire may provide the instructor with some guidelines in designing an effective teaching strategy and eventually to assess the effectiveness of such a technique through examining the learning gains achieved by students.

Data and analysis

Methods:

I am a English teacher of junior one, and my students are all around 14 years old. I teach two classes with 45 students in each. Most of them have studied English for two years in primary school. But some of them only know a little English. According to my survey, I’ve got the general information about the difficulties of my students in teaching English.

The graph shows that pre-test responses to the questions were not satisfactory. We believe that ten hours of teaching per week was not enough for students to learn and practise English in the classroom. After class, they never have chance to speak English. They dare not to talk with their teacher in English in school let alone when they are at home.

▲      An analysis of a survey on the students’ perceived difficulty in English learning:

Picture 1: (Pre-test, see table H and I)

(The data results comes from the survey of 90 students out of 480 in Haicang middle school at the beginning of the new school year in September, 2001)

• We can see that most of the students feel that English grammar and culture background are more difficult than listening, speaking and reading. They all believe that they lack enough vocabulary for reading and speaking. About 80 percent of the students have a problem with English culture. Most of them don’t know where Washington is. So in my essay I will try to describe some specific difficulties in my English teaching classroom.

Peer assessment sheets were provided to monitor the progress of others in the group (Appendix E). At the end of the twenty-week semester, a questionnaire was administered to the students to evaluate their experience of the peer review process. (Appendix F).

The questionnaire was comprised of a combination of fixed alternative questions and pen-ended questions. Open-ended questions tend to be more personal and involving. The students are more able to explain, elaborate, and refine the meaning of their comments; and they are able to get to the heart of the matter more readily (Heppner, and Johnson 1994). Questions 3,5,9,and 10 were of this open-ended type and dealt with reasons for the liking of disliking the peer assessment, comments on fair or unfair assessment, how students actually evaluated their peers, and lastly a question asking for further comments.

Table 1:  Students responses to the formative assessment (post-test on Sept.5, 2002)

Table 2: Students responses to the formative assessment (post-test)

Student A says: (In Chinese and English together)

“I could work on my strong points and develop the weaker points”

“It allows students to really know where they need help and improvement”

Student B says:

“It helped me to know my weakness and strengths. Also it was a good exercise for my future work”

Student C answers:

“Yes, it was helpful because initially I was confused, but I understand what I need”

Student D answers:

“Yes it was, because I had never cared myself and others and never put up my hands in the classroom and as a result, I would have gotten a terrible mark”

Classroom Assessment Techniques:

1)     Decide what you want to learn from a classroom assessment.

2)     Choose a Classroom Assessment Technique (CAT) that provides this feedback, is consistent with your teaching style, and can be easily implemented in your class.

3)     Explain the purpose of the activity to students, then conduct it.

4)     After class, review the results and decide what changes, if any, to make your students know what you learned from the CAT and how you will use this information.

5)     During the last few minutes of the class period, use a Minute Paper to ask students to answer on a half-sheet of paper: “What is the most important point you learned today?” and, “What point remains least clear to you?” The purpose is to elicit data about students’ comprehension of a particular class session. Review responses and note any useful comments. During the next class periods emphasize the issues illuminated by your students’ comments.

6)    Chain notes: Students pass around an envelope on which the teacher has written one question about the class. When the envelope reaches a student he/she spends a moment to respond to the question and then places the response in the envelope. Go through the student responses and determine the best criteria for categorizing the data with the goal of detecting response patterns. Discussing the patterns of responses with students can lead to better teaching and learning. In this process, it is ok to ask students to write their answers in Chinese or English.

Strategy:

At the beginning of the new semester in September 2001, a questionnaire (see picture 1, page 9) was administered to 91 of the students in my two classes to evaluate their experience in the target language of English. The questionnaire was comprised of a combination of fixed alternative questions and open-ended questions. (See the table H: the questions all in Chinese)

•  Open-ended questions tend to be more personal and involving. The students are more able to explain the meaning of their comments; and they are able to get to the heart of the matter more readily (Heppner, and Johnson, 1994). Open-ended type questions dealt with the peer assessment, comments on fair or unfair assessment.

•  Crockett and Peter (2002) point out that fixed alternative questions, on the other hand, are easier for the respond to answer and they enable comparability of answers. Moreover, the use of structured questions helps to reduce any biases that could occur due to the influence of the question designer. (p.20)

Pre-test questionnaire to assess student’s prior knowledge

In order to get more information about what the students think of the subject Ⅰwill teach, a pre-test questionnaire was designed for the first-year.(See table B of appendix)

The pre-test was conducted during the very first lecture in the class. The students marked their responses on the questionnaire and returned the completed questionnaire to instructor in the class. No time limit was imposed to complete the questionnaire so that the student could think carefully before answering the questions.

The analysis of the pre-test exposed the weakness and strength of the class.

This survey includes many aspects of the students: experience in learning English; family background; age and gender; hobbies; some difficulties in learning English;

I will draw conclusions by using SPSS to analyze all the collected information and data.

Results:

The post-test should have been conducted so that students are likely to explain their ideas in English mixed with Chinese if possible. This step will be carried out in 2002.

The data of the pre-and post-test are shown in Figure 1. This graph shows the number of students who correctly answered the questions in the pre- and post-test versus the question number. Comparison of the result shows that after 3 months of teaching, the ability of the students’ English learning and assessment has improved significantly.

The graph also shows that post-test responses to some questions were still not satisfactory. I will try to improve my teaching strategy after assessment. (I talk about it on P.10). This step will be carried out in late 2002. (See Table 1: result of midterm exam and the entrance test)

Figure 1: Bar graph of the pre and post-test, comparing 75% of student’s improvement over pre-test scores for each question. This graph shows significant improvement in student learning for most of the questions after this research.

Comparing of pre and post-test scores is shown if Figure 2. The large shift in the mean score of the post-test distribution indicates that the formative assessment has improved student learning.

Figure 2: Histogram of pre and post-test. The 78% of student’s improvement in the graph is showing improvement in student learning. Mean pre-test= + ， Mean post-test

= +

Include samples of pre=and post-test (See Appendix A.)

Discussion and Recommendation

This study in my ESL classrooms shows that a two-part strategy consisting of assessing the prior knowledge of students and then developing a teaching method to address the weakness of the class has improved student learning to some extent. The attendance in the class  throughout the semester has been around 90%, indicating student’s interest and subject satisfaction. (They are the same attendance before and after) The post-test without prior warning provides a measure of students’ learning and concept retaining abilities. Although the final result shows a 13.6% improvement over the previous year’s result, further and wider research is still needed to test the effectiveness of such a strategy on 2 or 3 different classes of students.

Conclusion:

This paper has reported an evaluation of changing the assessment system to incorporate more formative assessment and a substantial percentages of the related to peer review, with the latter also associated with a change from a teacher-centered to a greater team- and student-centered learning environment. Although far from conclusive, the evidence presented is encouraging for the change. Students appear to have adopted more appropriate learning strategies. They learned how to self-assess their own learning and understand the importance of cooperative learning through peer assessment.  The teachers are definitely happier with a substantial reduction in the pressure. The formative assessment in classroom carried out in my classroom has proved to be quite affected but not so good as we had expected. The daily general comments by the teacher have proved to support and encourage the students and drive them to work hard by themselves and not for teachers. Many students work together and prepare and present their wonderful works very well before their classmates (See table 1). The students have learned a lot compared student is the center, and everybody can show the potential talented ability even though their English test grades are not A. the students are humans and not products of the school line. In my report, I also want to reflect that it is a good chance for teachers to change their traditional idea about teaching.

The constraints are that the reform of the assessment in teaching are always criticized by the traditional ideas about teaching and education. Besides that, the most important thing is that nowadays the assessment of teachers has not been changed but for only one criterion—the students’ marks, for example, the result of the term exams. The next step for my experiment is to get more effective facts to persuade the leaders to be more patient, and I will gather more important data to support my idea. The success is still a long way to go. Rome cannot be built in one day, after all!

References

1.        Airasian, P.W (1991). Classroom assessment New York: McGraw-Hill.

2.        Airasian, P.W (1997). Classroom assessment (3^rd Edition) New York: McGraw-Hill.

3.        Angelo, T.A & Cross, P.K. (1993). Classroom assessment techniques (2 nd ed). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

4.        Arter, J. (1995) Portfolios for assessment and instruction. Greensboro, NC: ERIC Clearinghouse on Guidance. (http://www.ed.gov/database/ERIC_Digests/ed388890.html)

5.        Boston, C. (2002) The concept of formative assessment. ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation University of Maryland, College Park.

6.        Brown, D.H. (2002) Principle of language learning and teaching (4^rd Edition) Copyright 2000 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. Pearson Education Company, 10 Bank Street, White Plains, NY 10606

7.        Davis, B.G. (1993). Tools for teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

8.        Geoffrey Crockett and Vasanthi Peter (2002) School of Economics and Finance Curtin University of Technology, Teaching and Learning Forum 2002 〔on line〕 from http://www.curtin.edu.cn

9.        Gao L. S (2002) English language testing and assessment  People Education Press, China.

10.     Gerensee an Upshur (2000) Classroom-based evaluation in second language education the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK; introduced by Zhang L. Zhong (2000) and published Beijing Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, China.

11.     Hancock, Charles R (1994). Alternative assessment and second language study： What and why  ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics Washington DC 〔on line〕available from http://www.ed.gov/database/ERIC-Digesters/ed1376695

12.     Jack C. Richards & David Nunan (2000) Sencond language teacher education  the Press of the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK; and Beijing Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, China.

13.     Michael J. Wallance (2000) Action research for language teachers introduced by Li J. Chun (2000). Published by Beijing Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, China.

Appendix:

Table A distribution of final marks for unit

Table H This is the original copy of the surveys.

学校：海沧中学（Haicang middle school） 

试验班级（Experimental class）: 初一（3）（Junior 1）

人数：47

试验教师：林文俊（Johnson Lin）

对照班：（Controlled class）: 初一（4）

人数：47

教师：陈春光

一、家庭背景：（Background of the student’s families）

二、学习英语的经历及方式（The learning experience of students）

三、学习英语时的兴趣(The learning interest and motivation of students)

四、学习英语最感兴趣的是：(The most interesting things)

    五、学习英语最感到吃力的是（The most difficulties in ESL）

    六、你希望老师教学时应该（What students hope teachers to do）

    七、课外练习英语的方式（What students do outside classroom）

    八、英语水平提高不快的原因（The reason for hindering the students）