An Application Of Portfolio Assessment To English Reading Teaching In Junior Middle School

After the new curriculum reform was carried out and the new English curriculum standard was published, a reform on educational evaluation methods is quite urgent now. The traditional summative assessment has been paid too much attention to the final marks of students rather than their overall development and health condition in both physical and mental aspects, which goes far away from the purposes of education. It is widely required that the evaluation methods should be more scientific and humanistic. Therefore, portfolio assessment, a typical method of formative assessment, attracts much attention among educators and teachers. Portfolio assessment concentrates on the process of students' learning and growing, evaluating students according to their authentic learning materials, which could make up the shortcomings of traditional evaluation method. It can not only facilitate English teaching and learning but also optimize the evaluation system. Research on portfolio assessment indicate that portfolio assessment has a positive effect on students'English learning, such as improving learning effectiveness, enhancing learning interest, cultivating learning strategies and helping students form good learning habits.Based on previous studies, the present research applied portfolio assessment to English reading teaching in a junior middle school so as to answer the following research questions:1. What is the relationship between reading portfolio and students' reading ability? 2. How does portfolio assessment influence students' reading interest and learning strategies? And what about students' attitude towards reading portfolio?The research was conducted in Dulangkou Junior Middle School in Shangdong province, which lasted for 13 weeks. Two parallel classes were chosen from Grade 8, and Class 6 was selected as the Experimental Class (EC) randomly where reading portfolio was used. While Class 5 was the Controlled Class (CC) where students were taught in traditional way. Each class had 46 students with nearly balanced sex ratio and all the 92 students came from the same age range. In order to track students' development in English reading, the researcher adopted both quantitative research method and qualitative research method. Firstly, two reading tests were carried out in the two classes before and after the experiment for the sake of measuring students' reading ability. Secondly, two questionnaires were distributed in the EC, one was at the beginning of the research and the other was after it, for the purpose of investigating students' reading interest, reading strategies and their attitude to reading portfolio. Apart from that, the teacher interviewed eight students of the EC to inquire about their opinions on portfolio assessment as well as the advantages and disadvantages of this assessment method, which was recorded by the researcher carefully. All the data of the tests and questionnaires were analyzed by SPSS 19.0.The results of the reading tests show, compared with traditional teaching method, reading portfolio has a better effect on students' reading ability. Students' reading proficiency improves a lot in the EC. Meanwhile, the results of the questionnaires indicate that portfolio assessment contributes to improving students' reading interest, encouraging students to apply more reading strategies and providing them a practical way for cooperative learning and reflective learning. Finally, the author illustrates the deficiencies of the present research and gives some suggestions on English teaching and future studies.