Coming to Grips with Formative Assessment in English Language Teaching and Learning

Abstract

The current investigation attempts to demonstrate the importance of Formative Assessment in both learning and teaching processes. The main problem is that students do not appear to respond positively to FA, and teachers do not provide an effective FA during the course that makes students feel bored and prevents them to improve their acquisition of English language. Two hypotheses are formulated the first is devoted to students that is if students do not respond positively to FA, then they will not bridge their improvement gaps of learning. While the second hypothesis is specified to teachers that if they undertake to implement FA effectively, then they can improve learners 'acquisition of foreign language. It is important to answer the following research questions: what is FA for? What is the importance of FA in the learning and teaching processes? and how does FA work? In order to examine these hypotheses and answer these research questions, questionnaires are administrated randomly to both first year students and teachers at the Branch of English at Mohamed Kheider University of Biskra. The findings reveal that students respond positively to FA, but they encounter a serious psychological challenges one of them is the lack of self-confidence which prevents them to do so. Meanwhile, teachers do not use FA effectively because of their ignorance of FA process. This dissertation recommends that students should overcome their psychological challenges in order for better learning outcomes, whereas on the part of teachers, they need to be knowledgeable about all what concerns pedagogical basics such as language assessment to implement and vary FA effectively not only in middle and secondary schools, but also in universities.