A Study On The Application Of Portfolio Assessment In English Writing Teaching For Senior Two Students

English writing is an essential skill for learning English.It is considered as a very difficult part for senior high school students.One of the important reasons for this situation can be attributed to the disadvantages of traditional assessment methods.At present,traditional summative assessment has been the predominant approach to assess writing performance.According to the latest version of National English Curriculum for Senior High School(2017),it is suggested that the evaluation of English teaching should adopt a variety of assessment methods,which are mainly formative assessment supplemented by summative assessment.Portfolio assessment is one of the effective methods in formative assessment that attaches importance to the writing process and develops learner independence and self-reflective ability.Therefore,it is significant for optimizing the assessment method of English writing in senior high school by investigating the effect of writing portfolio assessment.The present study chose 103 students at Jiu Quan No.1 Middle School located in Gansu Province as research subjects.The participants of this study were from two parallel classes in Senior Two.During 12-week teaching experiment,experimental class was treated with portfolio assessment and control class was treated with traditional summative assessment.To be specific,the present study sets itself the goal of investigating the following three research questions:1)What is the current situation of senior two students’ English writing at Jiu Quan No.1 Middle School?2)What are the effects of portfolio assessment on improving students’ writing scores?Which aspects(content,organization,vocabulary usage,sentence construction,spelling and punctuation)will be affected by writing portfolio assessment?3)What are students’ attitudes toward writing portfolio assessment?The data were collected by tests,questionnaires and semi-structured interview,which were further analyzed by SPSS.The major findings are summarized as follows:1)Most of the senior two students at this school lacked English writing interests,confidence and initiative.They did not have enough self-knowledge and the habit ofself-reflection in English writing.Most of the students got used to be evaluated by the teacher.Most of them did not have the knowledge of portfolio assessment before the experiment.2)Portfolio assessment could improve the writing scores of senior two students effectively.Compared with control group,the portfolio assessment practice could improve the senior two students’ writing performance in terms of content and organization significantly.3)Most of the students held positive attitudes towards portfolio assessment.Their English writing interests,self-knowledge and self-reflection ability etc.were enhanced by portfolio assessment.Their attitudes towards self-reflection,self-assessment and peer-assessment were affected by their writing proficiency.In sum,portfolio assessment can be a successful instructional and assessment tool to improve senior high students’ English writing ability.