A Study On The Application Of Process-oriented Approach And Portfolio-assisted Assessment To English Writing Teaching In Senior Grade One

As an important productive skill,English writing accounts for a large proportion of language skills.It is an integrative application of English knowledge for learners,and to a large extent,English writing is an integration of fundamental knowledge,basic ability and extra-curriculum information,which acts as one crucial part in senior students' English examination and is a requirement for English communication as well.Senior high school students,especially senior ones,are in the period of the most active thinking,and therefore English writing teaching needs to guide them,step by step,to develop their multidimensional thinking and tap their potential to achieve further understanding about language knowledge and things in the world.Senior one students are at a turning point from middle schools to universities,and this is just a golden age when they can lay a solid foundation for their English learning.However,due to the over-emphasis on exam-oriented education and teacher-centered educational tradition,the current English writing teaching puts more emphasis on product-oriented approach which ignores the whole writing process.As a result,students' writing ability and thinking ability can't be improved effectively.Therefore,it's extremely necessary to explore an effective method to make some adjustments,facilitating English writing in senior high school.In the field of contemporary education,process-oriented approach and portfolio-assisted assessment have received much attention in actual research and teaching practice,but few researcher and teacher combine them together to conduct the whole English writing process.English Curriculum Standards for senior high school students advocate the pattern that integrates formative assessment with summative assessment,with its focus on the former,concerning about both the product and the process.Process-oriented approach focuses on the writing process,in which students finish the final draft under the teacher's guidance through a series of writing steps.As one of the formative assessment methods,portfolio-assisted assessment is concerned about the assessment process,in which students improve their writing ability through establishing their writing portfolios.English writing is a complex cognitive process,and therefore,the writing process is of vital importance.Since both two approaches focuses on the learning process,the author conducts an exploratory study by combining them together.The integration of them is of great advantage in remedying the defects of the product-oriented approach,because it cares more about the writing process and subsequent feedback after writing.The essence of this teaching mode is that the teacher works together with students to fulfill all the steps of English writing.This thesis aims to explore the effectiveness of the application of process-oriented approach and portfolio-aided assessment to senior one students' English writing.The author randomly selected two parallel science classes of senior one students of Neijiang No.1 Middle School,a provincial key middle school in Sichuan province,southwest China,as research participants.Class 2 was selected as the controlled class while class 7 was the experimental class.There was no significant difference between two classes in terms of English proficiency.The author adopted product-oriented approach in the controlled class to conduct English writing teaching,while process-oriented and portfolio-aided approach was employed in the experimental class.In the research of nearly four months,test,questionnaire,observation and interview were used to generate the quantitative and qualitative data.Through a thorough analysis of the data,the author found that under the guidance of process-oriented approach and portfolio-assisted assessment,senior one students' English writing ability and self-reflection have been improved a lot.In addition,most students are highly motivated to write actively and they show much interest in English writing.The research reveals that under-achievers get the most improvement in English writing ability.It also demonstrates that under-achievers obtained greater improvement in vocabulary and grammar,average students in sentence pattern and language expression,and top students in language expression and thinking ability respectively.