Research On Application Of Portfolio In English Autonomous Class

Portfolio encourages learners to assume responsibility for their own learning and enjoy full autonomy. Promoting portfolio assessment in higher education is of great significance. It is a worthwhile educational project to study how to facilitate learner autonomous development.This research tries to explore the influences of portfolio on students in autonomous class after two semesters'portfolio-based autonomous teaching and investigate the students' feelings, attitudes and suggestions after the application of portfolio. This research also compares the differences between portfolio-based autonomous classes and non portfolio-based autonomous classes and tries to find the differences between these two groups. The participants are the students who come from Dalian University of Technology with different majors. The four portfolio-based autonomous classes, as the experimental group, after two semesters'portfolio use, were compared with the control group (non portfolio-based autonomous classes). Questionnaires, interview, observation, journals are adopted in this research. According to the analysis of the quantitative data, after two semesters'application of portfolio, the mean score of experimental classes are higher than the control group on motivation, attitude, content, method, management, environment, critical thinking, innovative ability aspects, and the method aspect has reached the significant level. In the qualitative data, the students take positive attitude towards portfolio. They talk about the benefits that the portfolio has brought to them, the portfolio's impact on their lives, some related problems and so on, and then some constructive suggestions are given.This study shows the portfolio is practicable in college with two semesters'experiment. It is hoped that through the practice, exploration and research of portfolio application in college autonomous English classes, some valuable references could be provided for the research of portfolio, especially the study of application of portfolio in college autonomous class.