4.3 Equipping Students with Appropriate Learning Strategies 8

4.4 Enhancing Students’ Learning Motivation 8

4.5 Helping Students Carry Out Self-assessment in Their Learning Process. 9

4.6 Strengthening the Cooperative Learning 11

4.7 Creating Autonomous Learning Environment 11

5. Conclusion 12

Works Cited 14

 1. Introduction 

With the development of the society and economy, English, as one of the most influential and extensively used languages, not only has been playing an significant role in China’s international affairs, but also in personal development and progress. In order to improve the quality of college English teaching and learning, Ministry of Education issued the College English Curriculum Requirement (Trial Edition)(Requirements hereafter)in 2004, which provides colleges and universities with the guidelines for English instruction to non-English major students. The requirement indicates: “Assessment is a key component in College English teaching. A comprehensive objective and scientific assessment system is of great importance to the achievement of the course goal. It not only helps teachers obtain feedback and makes sure of teaching quality, but also provides students with an effective means to adjust their learning strategies and methods, and improve their efficiency.” Meanwhile, some problems still existing in the teaching and learning, for instance, teachers and students are focus on result but ignoring the process; the model is the teacher-centered，lacking students’ interest and need; The teachers and students are lack of inefficient feedback and so on. So, in recent years, the formative assessment has been paid wide attention by domestic and overseas scholars. With the application of formative assessment, students are more active and initiative to learn English and autonomous learning is obviously improved. In a word, the usage of formative assessment in the paper is helpful to students to turn from the passive receiving to the active anticipation in English learning.

Therefore, the purpose of the thesis is to explore the ways to enhance autonomous learning depended on the theory of formative assessment

2. Literature Review

2.1 The Definition of Formative Assessment

  Initially, the definition of formative assessment can be traced back to 1967 when Scriven firstly put forward it in his work The Methodology of Education. Mr. Scriven(1967: 38), American philosopher, who pointed out a vivid definition of both formative assessment and summative assessment ‘‘When the cook tastes the soup, it is formative assessment; when the guest tastes the soup, it is summative assessment’’. In other words, formative assessment emphasizes the process, while summative assessment stresses the result. They are different in evaluating the learning process. Some other scholars also defined formative assessment. Gipps defined formative assessment as a process in which teacher judges, appraises, or evaluates students’ work or performance, and makes use of it to shape and enhance students’ competence. Hedge defined formative assessment as a process of “ keeping track of the learners’ progress as it happens and identifying ways of helping it along”, which focuses on the process of learning.源[自*优尔^`论\文'网·www.youerw.com/

From above definitions, we can see different scholars used different words to interpret a same concept, although there are some similarities or relations among them. Formative assessment can be concluded that it is a type of evaluation method which main purpose is to excavate students’ learning potential, to reform and enhance students’ learning and to make teachers grasp students’ learning progress by analyzing and researching the feedback about students’ performance in order to conduct effective teaching.