1.1 Background of the Study
Such an approach ignores the emotional sides, writing strategies, andcultural cognition which also happen during the writing process. Writing in class istest-oriented and what the students pursue is to get high scores. Their writing proficiency isfar from satisfactory. In writing class, the traditional way is to give students lectures onwriting techniques, such as grammatical correctness, word spelling, sentence structure,language use. So students’ writing competence is evaluated just according to the testing scores.Also most of time, students are given lectures in a teacher-dominant classroom, and thecourses are presented in a poor way to promote students writing ability and autonomylearning. For the teacher in writing class, writing is a hard and time-consuming process full ofpressure. Teachers in senior high school are usually responsible for 3-4 classes, with morethan hundreds of compositions needed to be gone over. Such overburdened work can’tguarantee the teaching quality, because they may only focus on the grammar or vocabularywithout considering the writing instruction. If some mistakes are ignored, perhaps the studentswould make the same mistakes again and again. For students, writing is only the after-classhomework, sometimes there are no more comments, and students just focus on the scores andput them away. Lack of interaction in class and critical thinking, students are difficult to getskills to form their own thoughts, and writing skills. The interests and motivation of writingare also not stimulated.From above, traditional assessment, summative assessment focus on results more thanprocess. It brings in many negative aspects. In recent years, there are more and more effectivemethods of teaching and learning on writing. New Curriculum Standard advocates that it is agood way to use both formative assessment and summative assessment to promote thedevelopment of students’ proficiency; therefore the formative assessment is conducted inEducation by many researchers. In learning process, formative assessment can providesfeedback to the learners, from which the learners can get help and improve themselves. So itis a good mode to judge and facilitate learners’ learning process. Peer assessment is a newassessment which used as a supplementary of teacher assessment. With the help of processapproach to writing, peer assessment can offer the opportunity to revise the essays from whichthe students can form their thoughts from the subsequent essays and cultivate writingautonomy.
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1.2 Significance of the Study
Writing ability is regarded as the most important and difficult one among all the fourabilities of English learning. However, students’ writing is poor due to the abuse ofsummative assessment. English class can’t afford much time for writing. They would prefer toimprove reading, listening, grammar, and vocabulary rather than writing. Theteacher-centered method cuts students from peers and the students hardly get advice fromothers. As a result, the students may lose interests and self-confidence in writing which willlead bad performance in writing, and it is not beneficial for their English learning. So theChina Ministry of Education published the National English Curriculum for Senior HighSchool in 2017，英语论文网站，which advises formative assessment to assess students’ l，英语毕业论文
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