Abstract：Abstract: How to improve college students’ benign help-seeking tendency and restrain negative help-seeking behavior in EFL leaning through assessment contexts is a research topic involving academic conduct, and should be noteworthy in foreign language academic domain. The focus of this study is what kind of intervention effect college English assessment situation has on college students' English academic help-seeking (HS). The empirical results indicated that summative assessment (PAP1), as the main assessment means of EFL teaching in China, positively affected executive help-seeking (HS1) and avoidance help-seeking (HS2), but negatively affected instrumental help-seeking (HS3) at an insignificant level. Formative assessment (PAP2) moderated the impact of PAP1 on HS. As PAP2 went up, the positive impacts of PAP1 on both HS1 and HS2 became weaker, while the negative impact of PAP1 on HS3 became stronger. The study confirms that the assessment contexts can be used as an external intervention to achieve the dual purposes for inhibiting negative HS and promoting positive HS in EFL learning.
Key words: assessment; academic help-seeking; contextual intervention; EFL
