An Empirical Study Of Portfolio Assessment's Effects On Metacognitive Strategy Training

The College English Curriculum Requirements?Requirements?promulgated in2007 propose that one of the essential contents of college English teaching should be the training of learning strategies.As the high-level executive learning strategies,metacognitive strategies,which generally involve the planning,monitoring and evaluation in learning process,play a dominant role in the system of learning strategies.Many researches have revealed that metacognitive strategy training can improve learning efficiency,which is taken as the key to cultivating students'learning autonomy.Meanwhile,Requirements suggests that comprehensive evaluation system should be conducted in college English teaching,highlighting the importance of formative assessment.As a model of formative assessment,portfolio assessment has attracted much attention from scholars since its introduction to Chinese educational domain in the early 21^st century.It is defined as the systematic examination of a collection of student work that documents a learner's endeavors,growth,reflection and achievements.Studies have shown that such multifaceted and dynamic evaluation method is conducive for cultivating students'cognitive ability and metacognitive awareness.The thesis,based on metacognition theory and comprehensible output hypothesis,combines the reform in teaching contents with that in evaluation system.It seeks to explore the feasibility of applying portfolio assessment to guide students'employment of metacognitive strategies,so as to enrich the model of metacognitive strategy training.Comparative pedagogical experiment is designed based on Non-English majors'English writing learning,with the data collected from questionnaires and semi-interviews.The findings of the empirical study illustrate that:portfolio assessment can promote learners'metacognitive strategy training on English writing in the following five facets:goal-setting,planning,self-monitoring,self-assessing and reflection,which indicates its practical significance for current college English teaching reform.