Study on Construction of Dynamic Assessment System for College Online English Writing

Abstract

Summative assessment is widely used in college English writing in China, which emphasizes the product greatly and ignores the writing process. Thus, it cannot improve students’ writing proficiency effectively. This paper aims to introduce the application and construction of dynamic assessment system for college online English writing in science university. Finally the feedback from students is discussed and they think highly of this assessment system. KEYWORD: dynamic assessment; online college English writing; writing proficiency International Conference on Social Science, Education Management and Sports Education (SSEMSE 2015) © 2015. The authors Published by Atlantis Press 414 has put it into teaching of English writing. However, it has aroused great interests of scholars and teachers, which will provide a new perspective for second language teaching. 2 CONSTRUCTION OF DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT SYSTEM FOR COLLEGE ENGLISH WRITING IN SCIENCE UNIVERSITY It has been a headache for teachers that it is a waste of efforts but with low effectiveness for college English teaching. Fang Yan found that lacking of effective teaching method especially absence of effective assessment method is the main reason and teachers may not give students satisfactory feedback. This phenomenon is more seen in science universities. Taking our university for example, normal college English writing is accomplished in the pattern of “Teacher assigning---students’ handing in----teacher’s feedback” , in which teachers grade students’ compositions by their final and only products from aspects of language, content and organization. This is called summative assessment, and teachers cannot give individual guidance for students because of painstaking teaching. In informal interview, students are not satisfied with this way of grading and they usually focus on the final marks of their compositions, while ignoring the further revision. For another, teachers’ awareness about using network platform is still weak and they rarely do research on online teaching and communication. Therefore, it is a must for us to make use of online resources to conduct the reform of teaching of college English writing and establish dynamic assessment system. The frame is based on process writing. Focus of EFL writing instruction in China has changed from the end product to the writing process in the past several years (Best, 1995). According to many researchers, process writing instruction suits better than traditional methods in meeting the needs of the modern information society (Deng, 2003; Jia, 1998). Then lots of researchers contribute most of their efforts to perfect EFL writing process instruction, and a great number of practitioners try to apply the steps of writing process—generating ideas, structuring, drafting, revising and editing, into their writing courses in the hope of better enhancing learners’ independent writing ability than traditional approach (White & Arndt, 1991). Though process writing approach has been used widely in classrooms throughout the world, the way to respond to learners’ writing, or the way to assess learners’ compositions becomes an emergent issue. Nation-wide researches about EFL writing assessment indicate that some practitioners have adopted some modified assessment methods, such as self assessment, peer assessment, and teacher conference, etc., but the limitations are obvious. First, the number of empirical research papers on assessment of process writing is few. According to Yao & Cheng’s (2005) statistic research on the development of English writing in China since 1980s, there are only 3 pieces (Chen, 1994; Yang, 1996; Zuo, 2002) of such kind papers among the 165 referred pieces. Second, the design of assessment lacks proper supporting theory. Yang (1996), for example, made his research merely based on foreign researchers’ assessment practice (Zamel, Fathman, Whalley, Hyland, etc.). Third, the research of assessment is confined to either several assessment methods in one step of writing process or one assessment method during the whole process. Yang (1996), for instance, only used teacher assessment to evaluate students’ composition from grammar error correction and content comment in the steps of revising draft and editing. Fourth, although the available research findings could show various assessment methods’ advantages in promoting English learners’ writing ability, there are still some requirements from English learners, involving being puzzled in how to begin writing and what to write, having trouble in using grammar properly in their compositions, being confused of the criteria of good writing, etc. (Cai & Fang, 2006). The details are as follows. And we can see from the above table, all the stages of writing are conducted on Internet except for pre-writing stage. In each stage, teachers will participate in guiding and manipulating students to make assessments on their performance. Table 1. Construction of Dynamic Assessment System