An Empirical Study On Portfolio Assessment In English Reading Teaching Of Senior High School

Assessment plays an important role in English reading teaching and is considered as an essential part to improve one's language competence.The current Common Senior High National School Curriculum Standard proposes that teachers should pay more attention to students' reading competence,which can be cultivated by using effective assessment ways in reading classes.However,the traditional assessment ways,especially the summative assessment,is not satisfying.In this situation,summative tests are the only way to evaluate their reading competence,which neglect the important roles of reading process such as accumulating reading strategies.However,reading strategies are considered as the efficient way to improve reading competence.As a result,most students are at a low reading comprehension level even some students are afraid of reading.As one of formative assessments,the portfolio assessment(PA)can focus on the whole learning process so as to efficiently make up the limitations of traditional assessments.In this study,portfolio assessment is applied to English reading teaching in senior high school,which aims to see whether students' reading comprehensive ability(scores)is promoted and the applications of students' reading strategies can be improved.The following research questions are attempted to answer:Q1: Can portfolio assessment promote students' reading comprehensive ability?Q2: To what degree can portfolio assessment improve the applications of reading strategies?In order to answer the research questions,a five-month study was carried out 83 students of Grade One were randomly selected as participants from two parallel classes in No.2 Senior High School,Jinzhou,Liaoning province.One class(42)was chosen as experimental class using portfolio assessment mode and the other class(41)was selected as control class accepting traditional assessment mode.Tests,questionnaires and interview were conducted as instruments in this study.The SPSS 19.0 software was also employed to analyze the data.From the analysis of experimental results,it can be learned that the portfolio assessment can promote senior high school students' English reading comprehensive ability and improve the applications of reading strategies.Therefore,teachers should guide students to make their own reading portfolios and cultivate comprehensive competence of reading efficiently.