The Application Of Portfolio Assessment In English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

As a basic skill of language learning,it is very important to master the English writing skill in English learning.All of practicing teachers have been aware of this point.Nowadays,more and more English teachers pay much attention to the writing teaching and learning process.In Arthur Brookes&Peter Grundy's book Beginning to write,writing is divided into seven parts:planning,targeting,organizing,drafting,evaluating,editing,and rewriting.And they also articulated that "it is worth that noting the process writing leads naturally to self-assessment,discussion with classmates,and even to peer-assessment.Process writing implies that evaluation and feedback will be useful,because the two aspects occur within the writing process at the same time,and they are frequently carried out by the writers themselves".At the end of last century,Portfolios had become a popular formative assessment to evaluate the students' writing achievements(Camp,1996;Elbow,1991;Elbow&Belanoff,1997;Tierney,Carter,&Desai,1991;Wiggins,1989).Portfolio assessment emphasizes students' achievements,students' efforts and improvement of writing ability(Tierney,Carter,&Desai,1991).The present research attempts to apply the portfolio writing assessment in the one of the northwest senior high school and to investigate if the students regard this formative assessment as a useful way to improve their writing achievements.In order to make a further understanding of portfolio assessment's effects on the students' writing achievements,the study tries to explore the exact effects on students with high,medium,or low writing achievements.In addition,the study attempts to seek the attitudes of students towards the English writing with the application of portfolio assessment in senior high school,and further to find the different attitudes of students with different writing achievements about the application of the portfolio assessment in their writing process.In this paper,the author selected 100 students as study subjects.All of them come from two intact classes from Grade two of Dingxi No.l Senior High School.One class was randomly chosen as the experimental class,with the other one as the control class.The portfolio assessment was applied in experimental class,while the control class insisted the originally summative assessment as usual.The whole portfolio assessment implementation lasted 10 weeks.Pre-test&Post-test,two questionnaires,Pre-interview&Post-interview,and the evaluation criteria were applied as research instruments.The purpose of those instruments is to answer two research questions:1).Can the portfolio assessment improve the students' English writing achievements in senior high school?And to what extend can portfolio assessment affect the writing achievements of senior high school students with different writing levels?2).Will the students'attitudes of English writing change after the application of the portfolio assessment?3)Do the students with different writing levels have different attitudes towards portfolio assessment?After study,it has been found that 1)the portfolio writing assessment can improve the students'English writing achievements;the portfolio assessment has the greatest positive impact on the low group students' writing achievements,the medium group has also made a progress in English writing achievements.On the contrary,the high group seems to have no evident progress in writing test.2)The attitudes of students towards the English writing after the application of portfolio assessment in senior high school can be concluded from six aspects:writing interest,confidence,self-knowledge,initiative,reflection,and evaluation.3)Furthermore,there are some differences in the attitudes of students with different writing levels,especially those students who have higher writing level.For them,there is a preference to self-assessment.Furthermore,the students with medium writing level are likely to have better impression of the peer-assessment than others.In addition,the repetition of the same topic writing drafts can lead to the puzzle of students,especially for the students with lower writing level.Moreover,most students believe that there is a certain relationship between reflective journal and the improvement of the writing ability.