This thesis mainly discusses about whether formative assessment has a direct relationship with junior high students’ English learning motivation or not。 This study aims to answer these questions:

3) How does formative assessment stimulate students’ motivation?

4) What formative assessment strategies can be used to enhance junior high school students’ motivation to learn English?

1。2 Significance of the Study

    Educational assessment always uses the tests and quizzes to judge students’ progress and focuses on students’ marks。 However, with the development of modem education, the situation has changed a lot。 Students’ abilities can not be judged only by their examination results。 According to English Curriculum Standard (2011), comprehensive language competence includes language knowledge, culture, learning strategies, skills, attitudes and culture etc。 and the curriculum goals are to develop them。 Therefore, to achieve the curriculum goals and keep the development of teaching ability, the teachers should focus more on the flexible use of assessment approaches and the application of formative assessment。

    In fact, not only the students but also the the teachers are under the pressure of examination, which makes English as a communicative tool。 Having no interests in English, they are not willing 

to put effort into learning English。 In order to stimulate the desire of the students in middle school and make them believe themselves to learn English well, it is necessary for the teachers to change their minds of assessment ways and put the students into the center of learning process。 In the field of present assessment research, formative assessment has attracted more and more attention because formative assessment can provide teachers and students with immediate and effective feedback for the future development。 It is of great vitality because it puts more emphasis on the perse methods, forms, contents and so on。 However, it’s hard for most of English teachers to put enough energy on formative assessment。 The testing system is still the mainstream of the education evaluation, and the traditional way cannot be replaced quickly。论文网

Therefore, this study is undertaken to find out that there is positively significant correlation of formative assessment and student motivation。 Meanwhile, some effective formative assessment strategies are used in and out of class to stimulate students motivation, further to improve English learning proficiency。

1。3 Overall Structure of the Thesis 

This dissertation consists of five chapters。 

Chapter One presents a simple introduction to the research background and purpose of the present study。 The overall structure of the dissertation is introduced in the following part。

In Chapter Two, the relevant literature will be reviewed on the related motivation theories and formative assessment studies, laying a solid foundation for theoretical background of the present study。 

Chapter Three is concerning with the research design of the survey study, which introduces the participants of the study, methods of data collection, the questionnaire method used to measure students’ learning attitudes, engagements in learning, and opinions on assessment strategies。 Then the study will present the procedure of the experiment and give a brief introduction of some formative assessment strategies which are adopted during the experiment。 

Chapter Four is composed of results and analysis。 In this part, through data analysis, we will obtain the answers to the questions we have raised in Chapter Three。

Chapter Five gives a conclusion of the whole dissertation。 On one hand, it presents the dissertation findings and concerns practical implications。 On the other hand, it pinpoints some limitations in this research and makes suggestions and recommendations for further research。