A Case Study Of Portfolio-based Writing Assessment On Enlish Writing Teaching In A Vocational College

Writing is an essential productive competence of language. Meanwhile, writingis an important language skill vocational college students need to acquire in Englishlearning. However, in terms of curriculum, there is no writing course in mostvocational colleges. In terms of textbooks, the writing part accounts for very fewpercentage. Therefore, writing teaching hasn’t been paid much attention to and stillremained weak in English teaching of vocational colleges.Besides the above problems, a vital problem needed to be addressed is what kindof assessment should be adopted in writing teaching in vocational colleges.Assessment is a kind of reflection or evaluation on teaching, which is an indivisiblepart of language teaching. Assessment is divided into summative assessment andformative assessment. Due to the influence of the traditional assessment system andstandardized test methods, summative assessment is adopted in writing teaching inmost vocational colleges. Summative assessment neglects students’ subjectivity andcreativity, and it fails to evaluate students’ writing in a complete and comprehensiveway. However, formative assessment focuses on students’ writing process and efforts,which is quite different from summative assessment. It focuses on students’ learningprocess and result. Hence, formative assessment begins to be more and more adoptedin writing teaching.The portfolio-based writing assessment which emerged and developed in the1980sis a new form of formative assessment. Compared with traditional pen-and-paper tests,it dynamically assesses students’ learning and offers timely feedback on their learning.It records students’ efforts and achievements and shows students’ strengths andweaknesses in their learning process. Thus, it stimulates students to be interested inlearning and promotes them to make great progress.The purpose of the case study is to investigate the influence and changes broughtabout by portfolio-based writing assessment (PBWA) to vocational college students.Four questions are answered in the study. They are as follows: a. Can PBWA changesthe participants’ interests in writing? b. Whether there is a change in the participants’ attitudes towards the writing portfolio before and after the experiment? c. Can PBWApromote the participants’ reflection awareness in writing? d. Can PBWA improve thewriting ability of the participants?In this study, eight non-English major students from Shandong Trade UnionVocational College, enrolled in September2011, are chosen as the participants of thecase study. The writing level of eight students is medium or low. They typicallyrepresent most students in vocational colleges. They are divided into two groups:Group A and Group B. Students in Group A take part in the whole experiment whilestudents in Group B only take part in two questionnaires and writing tests. The wholeexperiment lasts sixteen weeks. Qualitative and quantitative methods are both adoptedin the study. Quantitative data is analyzed by SPSS16.0while qualitative data isanalyzed through transaction analysis.Based on the results of qualitative and quantitative data, major findings are asfollows: Firstly, participants’ interests in writing have been greatly improved afterPBWA. Participants in GA often use English to write a diary or letter after theexperiment. Secondly, participants in GA think that a writing portfolio is not only acontainer of writing pieces, but also a type of writing assessment. It perfectly assessesstudents’ writing and shows the writing process. Thirdly, participants in GA oftenreflect their compositions and accept the feedback from their peers and teachers. Thatleads to the improvement of their writing ability. Last but not least, participants in GAchoose flexible words and sentences and pay more attention to the collocation andtense. What’s more, they form the habit of drawing an outline before writing andchecking out compositions after writing.This thesis also proposes a few implications for vocational college English writingteaching based on the major findings of the study. Meanwhile, the limitations of thestudy are summarized and corresponding suggestions for future studies are providedwith the hope of paving the way for more relevant studies.