An Action Research On Effect Of English Writing Portfolio Assessment On Junior High School Students' Self-reflection Ability

As an important part of junior high school English teaching,English writing teaching plays a vital role in cultivating students' comprehensive language ability.However,according to the investigation of the present English writing teaching situation in junior high school,and the author's internship experience in a junior high school of Heyuan City in Guangdong Province,the author finds that students' writing ability is far from satisfaction.Some students even do not reach the basic requirements of the New English Curriculum Standard for Writing.One of the possible reasons is that the traditional assessment focuses only on the students' writing outcome,ignoring their writing process,so that it cannot fully cultivate their English writing ability nor their self-reflection ability which is crucial for both their writing and future development.As an important means of formative assessment,portfolio assessment has many advantages in cultivating students' English writing ability and their self-reflection ability.On one hand,the writing portfolio can help the teacher to find out students' writing problems more easily and therefore timely offer students the help they really need so as to improve their writing proficiency.On the other hand,with the help of writing portfolio,the students themselves can reflect their writing process,and therefore they will try to solve the problems that they meet in the writing process.In this way,they will gradually improve their English writing and self-reflection abilities.Therefore,it is of great significance to adopt portfolio assessment in the English writing teaching in junior high school.This study,based on the current situation of writing teaching,is to discuss the effect of English Writing Portfolio Assessment on improving student's writing proficiency and their self-reflection ability of junior high school students.This study was conducted among 40 students in a junior high school in Heyuan City,Guangdong Province.The action research of portfolio assessment writing teaching,which was conducted in the 40 minutes of the self-study period oneach Thursday afternoon,lasted 11 weeks.The research tool used was the pre and post-tests,questionnaire and interview.The research is to find out the answers to the following two questions:(1)Which aspect of students' self-reflection ability can be significantly improved by English writing portfolio assessment?(2)Why can portfolio assessment improve students' writing proficiency?The data collected is analyzed by SPSS 18.0 in this study.There are two main findings in the study:(1)Portfolio assessment can significantly improve students' reflection awareness and reflection skills in writing.(2)By participating in the evaluation and reflection tasks in the application of portfolio assessment,students constantly narrow the gap between themselves and the writing standards and therefore their writing proficiency get improved.Based on the above research results,the author has some enlightenment on how to improve the portfolio assessment of English writing,and puts forward some suggestions for the future research.