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

From the view of assessment process, it can be divided into two categories: summative assessment and formative assessment. Summative assessment is applied at the end of teaching process to form the final results. While formative assessment is applied during the teaching and learning process. For decades, summative assessment has been a dominate role in teaching, especially in the English writing area. It pays excessive focus on the results rather than the whole writing process. Besides, the effect of summative assessment on motivating students’ interest, confidence, good manners in writing is not satisfying. The new English curriculum standards claim to improve the evaluation criterion, applying the combination of summative and formative assessment. Portfolio assessment, as one form of formative assessment, is based on the constructivism theory, metacognition theory and humanism theory. By collecting students’ learning information, portfolio builds the comprehensive evaluation for students. Portfolio assessment improves the efficiency of teaching and learning on the basis of summative assessment. This process stimulates students’ interest and initiative, and is beneficial to the reflection of students and teachers in their learning and teaching. In China, and yet, very little research explores the application of portfolio assessment. The application of portfolio assessment has to be universal.This research mainly focuses on the application of portfolio assessment in English writing in junior high school,attempting to answer these questions:(1)Can portfolio assessment stimulate students’ interest in writing?(2)Can portfolio assessment improve students’ self-reflection degree in writing?(3)Can portfolio assessment improve students’ English writing achievements? The author applied the portfolio assessment in the writing class in a junior high school in Minhe, Qinghai province. This application experiment was carried out within about ten weeks. There were two parallel classes in ninth grade randomly chosen, class1 was chosen as the experimental class(EC), and class 2 was the control class(CC). The results of pre-questionnaires and pre-test proved that both the EC and CC are in the same level. The experimental class was taught with portfolio assessment, and the control was with the traditional summative assessment. Forty students in EC learned to build portfolio in writing activity and reflected themselves after peer-assessment, and forty-one students in CC were simply asked to finish writing. Both the CC and EC had the same teacher, same writing material, and same time. Two writing tests and questionnaires were conducted to both in the EC and CC to investigate their performance in learning interest, and self-reflection.The results of the experiment indicate that portfolio assessment is much beneficial to students’ writing performance, comparing with the traditional summative assessment. It definitely can improve students’ English writing interest, self-reflection degree and writing achievements. However, the results from the research couldn’t account for all phenomena on English writing because of the limited samples, and the length of time is also limited for the further research. So the students would benefit a lot from this application if we can apply this kind of formative writing assessment method more effectively in the further teaching and learning.