The Application Of Portfolio Assessment To English Writing In Junior High School

Writing is one of the four basic skills for junior high school students,and it has attracted tons of attention in English writing field.However,there're still many problems in junior high school students' writing and their writing abilities still need improving.It is mainly caused by English writing assessment.Nowadays most schools still use traditional assessment(summative assessment)to evaluate the students' writing,which just focuses on the grades and the scores of the students.The summative assessment only pays attention to the writing results,and it doesn't care about the process and the progress that students make;it makes students lose the interests in English writing gradually.Thus teachers are supposed to adopt a more effective assessment system to evaluate the junior high school students' writing.The author did an experiment called “the Application of Portfolio Assessment to English Writing in Junior High School”,which lasted 4 months and a half.It is a formative assessment,and it pays more attention to the process and the progress that students make.The purpose of the study is to answer four questions:(1)Can writing portfolio stimulate students' writing interests?(2)Can writing portfolio improve students' writing abilities?(3)Can writing portfolio improve students' abilities of self-reflection and assessment?(4)Can writing portfolio promote students' awareness of communication and cooperation? Two parallel classes in Grade 9 from Anqing NO.14 Middle School were chosen as the subjects;Class 6 was the control class and Class 7 was the experimental class.Class 6 used the traditional assessment while Class 7 adopted the new assessment.Three instruments were adopted: questionnaires,writing tests and interviews.The results of pre-questionnaires and pre-test showed that there were no obvious differences between the two classes before the experiment and they are at the same level.After the experiment,the control class only changed a little,while the experimental class changed a lot.According to the results,the four questions were examined: writing portfolio can stimulate students' writing interests;it can improve their writing abilities;it can improve their abilities of self-reflection and assessment;and it can promote students' awareness of communication and cooperation.The writing portfolio is a kind of effective assessment and the students would benefit a lot from this assessment widely.However,the results from the research couldn't account for all phenomena in English writing because of the limited samples.If the whole grade students are chosen,the results should be more persuasive.It is time-consuming and also needs a lot of concern and effort.