The Experimental Research On Portfolio Assessment In English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

The New National English Curriculum standards requires students to master four basic skills: listening,speaking,reading,writing and translating.And the writing is the comprehensive reflection of listening,speaking,reading and translating.Whether a student is able to use the English knowledge and skills learnt before to communicate can be fully reflected in writing.In this sense,writing can reflect a students' comprehensive ability of using language and is a very important link with the highest demands to students,though it is still in the weak link in reality.There are lots of reasons for this situation,one of which is the disadvantages of traditional writing assessment method.The traditional assessment method belongs to the summative assessment,as a result,its focus is writing result instead of writing process.Therefore,under the wrong guidance of the traditional assessment methods,teachers,schools,parents,and even students themselves focus on the final scores rather than focus on strengthening the students' English writing ability.Over time,students lose their confidence in writing and their improvement of writing proficiency is hindered at last.In addition,the education of senior high school is a very important period in students' learning career,and the third year is undoubtedly a priority for all.So,the issue on senior students' English writing requires to be solved timely and effectively.According to the present situation,the New National English Curriculum Standards advocates the combination of summative assessment and formative assessment.There are many benefits of the formative assessment.On the one hand,the teacher can clearly grasp the writing situation of each student and then adjust the teaching plan;on the other hand,students can find their own advantages and disadvantages and progress in writing.Portfolio assessment,as one of the forms of formative assessment,has the characteristics of formative assessment,and it is a wise choice to apply it to English writing teaching.The purpose of this thesis is to clarify two questions:(1)Can portfolio assessment facilitate the improvement of writing proficiency more effectively than summative assessment?(2)Can portfolio assessment facilitate the improvement of writing self-efficiency more effectively than summative assessment? In this research,questionnaires,pre-test and posttest were used to understand the change of students' writing self-efficacy and writing proficiency separately.After the six-month long experiment,mass of data has been collected from the questionnaires,pre-test and post test.According to the data,it is natural to draw a conclusion that students' English writing self-efficacy and writing proficiency have been improved both in the experimental class and the control class.However,in the experimental class where the writing classes were organized through portfolio assessment,students' progress in those two aspects was more considerable.This result has nicely supported the author' experimental hypotheses and has verified the validity of portfolio assessment in English writing teaching.Except for the success in solving the experimental questions,this research has also revealed other positive effects of portfolio assessment in educating and teaching,such as inproving the quality on teaching and easing the relationship between teacher and students.Moreover,there is still a pity that the time duration of the experiment is relatively short so that lots of benefits of the portfolio assessment cannot be revealed completely.Hence,it is favourable to make amand this pity in further researches.