Formative assessment and self-regulated learning: How formative assessment supports students’ self-regulation in English language education

This paper addresses how formative assessment can support secondary students’ self-regulated learning in English language education. Self-regulated learning is an essential capability required for lifelong learning, which allows students to construct knowledge through identifying their learning goals, self-managing their learning process and self-evaluating their performance against goals. Although there is consensus in the literature that formative assessment has great potential for supporting self-regulated learning among students, how such potential is afforded through teachers’ formative assessment practices in English language classrooms is underexplored. In this paper, findings from classroom observations and interviews with two teachers and 16 high school students in a foreign language school are reported. The findings reveal that, guided by their teachers, these students engaged in formative assessment in a proactive manner and appeared to be emerging as self-regulated learners; they perceived the classroom formative assessment activities that they experienced to be helpful in developing their deep understanding of and capability for self-regulating learning. Copyright © 2018 Asia TEFL.