Looking Forward: Formative Assessment and its Importance to Learning and Teaching of L2 Chinese

This talk introduces the nature, theoretical notions of formative assessment and the ways it is carried out in classroom and teacher-learner interaction. It will also explain why formative assessment greatly affects our learners’ motivation, confidence and independence. The five strategies for formative assessment will be presented and discussed to emphasise the fact that teaching and learning activities are all in fact intwined with formative assessment. It not only assists learning but also improves teaching.

Therefore, it is critical that teachers know those strategies and apply them appropriately and effectively. Specifically, as most our students are learning a very different language from their first language, they need vigorous formative assessment to know where they are in relation to the learning objectives and what to do next to meet the expectations.

 

LU Yang has an MA in TEFL and PhD in language assessment. She has taught Chinese of different levels, translation and supervised MA and PhD students in comparative literature and Chinese as a foreign language. Since 2000, she has organized and developed assessments of different purposes for L2 Chinese courses and acted as the external examiner for several UK universities.

Her research interests have covered discourse analysis of learners’ speech in English, validity of standardized tests of L2 English and Chinese tests. Yang has published a book, Assessing Learners’ Competence in L2 Chinese, an edited collection, Teaching and Learning Chinese in Higher Education, and research articles on standardising L2 Chinese competence with the Common European Framework of Reference, the criterion-referenced validity of the HSK tests, explicit instruction of L2 Chinese grammar, Chinese EFL test-takers’ spoken discourse competence, etc.