The Cultivation of Chinese Learners’ English Writing Competency through Learning-oriented Assessment

This study is to empirically investigate the effect of the learning-oriented assessment on Chinese learners’ development of English writing competency. This experiment was implemented in the writing classroom among 74 English majors from a local Chinese university within one term, and the findings from the analysis of 68 pairs of qualified essays indicate a significant difference between the scores in the pretest and the posttest. Based on the fact that the participants displayed a better performance on the lexical and syntactic level in the posttest, it can be inferred that the participants have shown a tendency of being better at exerting their linguistic ability together with their topic knowledge, cognitive and metacognitive strategies to achieve the communicative goal through the learning-oriented assessment model.