On The Application Of The Portfolio-assisted Process Approach To Senior High School Writing Classroom

Chinese Ministry of Education promulgated the National English Curriculum for Senior High School in 2003,which advocates a teaching emphasis on the writing process and advises a formative way to assess student's learning performance.Besides,it stipulates new criterion of how the students' writing competence should be evaluated.It states that the assessment of students' writing competence ought to be approached from the contents of writing,the logic and creativity in description,the proper use of grammar, the word spelling,the correct usage of punctuation marks,and the writing attitudes.This new criterion aims at making the students to obtain a sense of success during the learning process through which the students constantly develop self-awareness,establish confidence,adjust their learning strategies,and ultimately their integrated skills in language use will be improved extensively.However,most instruction of English writing in senior high school still falls back on the traditional product approach.Such approach sees English writing as a non-recursive and linear one.It ignores the skills,knowledge,emotional sides,writing strategies,and cultural cognition which happen during the process of writing,but only emphasizes the final product of students' writing and grammatical correctness is of its importance. Accompanied by this approach,student's writing competence is evaluated just according to the final paper.To some extent,this way of evaluation is neither fair nor believable.And the product approach is not only far from the criterion made by the new National English Curriculum but also,to some extent,against some of it.In order to solve the problems we have discussed above,the author proposes the portfolio-assisted process approach and makes an exploratory application of it to senior high school writing classroom.The portfolio-assisted process approach integrates the process approach which is widely used in writing instruction abroad and the portfolio assessment which is a way proposed by the new National English Curriculum to evaluate students' performance.This combination precisely mirrors two requirements in the new National English Curriculum:A.set up and use study portfolio when assessing learners;B. pay close attention to learning process and care about learning process as well as the result; try to harmonize the evaluation on process with result.This study tries to deal with the following three questions:A.Can the portfolio-assisted process approach motivate the students to write more actively and have more confidence in writing?B.Can students' writing competence,both in form and content,be improved through this approach?C.Can the students still write better in a timed composition?The author carried out an experiment in Tongliang High School.Two classes of senior one students of the same English proficiency were randomly chosen as an experimental class and a control class.The study lasted approximately three months with the experimental class taught through the portfolio-assisted process approach while the control class the product approach.The author collected some relevant data and analyzed them,using both qualitative and quantitative methods.The results of the experiment showed that students in the experimental class made progress in writing and their confidence in and motivation to writing were enhanced. Moreover,in a timed composition,students from the experimental class wrote better. These indicated that the portfolio-assisted process approach had a positive effect on teaching and learning writing.However,the study was only an exploratory one and it also had some limitations and problems.So long as the high school teachers concern their teaching context and explore in their practice,the most suitable way is sure to be found.