A Study On The Application Of Electronic Portfolio To Oral English Teaching In Vocational School

With the fast development of information technology(IT)and implementation of China's“Internet +”strategy,the merge of information technology and course teaching has become a“New Normal”in educational area,and electronic portfolio has been widely applied in course teaching.Compared with paper-based portfolio,electronic portfolio can organize,collect and arrange portfolio content in the form of multimedia,record students9 learning process and improvement pretty veritably,it possesses the advantages of being portable,easy to operate and high efficient.Electronic portfolio assessment is an authentic qualitative assessment method based on IT,its advantages are diversity,personalization and improving overall development.The cultivation of oral English competence has been the core of English teaching in vocational schools,yet some problems on oral English assessment have been existing in some vocational schools:sole assessment method,sole assessment content,sole assessment subject,which lead to low motivation,negative attitude and unsatisfactory oral English competence.The application of electronic portfolio assessment is a good solution to these problems.However,the implementation of electronic portfolio assessment is a great difficulty in vocational schools due to the shortage of teaching hardware and software materials.Therefore,it is more tally with the actual situation in vocational schools to apply electronic portfolio as an instrument of formative assessment,combined with online communicating software like QQ Mailbox and WeChat,to make assessment on students' learning process and improvement.Based on the above,this empirical study applied Constructivism Theory,Multiple Intelligence Theory,and Output hypothesis as supports,made an attempt to apply electronic portfolio to oral English teaching in a vocational school.In the study,electronic portfolio was applied as an instrument to organize,collect and arrange the students' evidence of learning,and make assessment on learning process.The aim was to explore the specific application of electronic portfolio in vocational schools,and to improve students' oral English competence and learning attitude.The subjects of the study were 90 students from two parallel classes of Grade 2,majoring banking business in a vocational school in Lanzhou.The experiment lasted 16 weeks,from March,2017 to June,2017.Before the experiment,the 90 students filled pre-questionnaire on attitude and took pre-test on oral English competence,the results showed no significant difference in the two class on attitude and oral English competence.Therefore,the two classes were set up as experimental class(EC)and controlled class(CC)respectively.In the experiment,the teaching content was the same in the two classes which were taught by the same teacher.Electronic portfolio was applied in EC to organize,collect and organize the text,image,audio and video materials of students' class activities,assignments and works,and to make formative on students' learning process and improvement;while the sole assessment method-summative assessment was applied in CC to make summative assessment on students' learning results.After the experiment,the two classes filled the same questionnaire as pre-questionnaire and took the post-test.The study applied Pretco-level A Oral Test paper,the assessment criteria for the test,attitude questionnaire on oral English learning and students' electronic portfolio to collect data.The main findings of the study are indicated as the following:Firstly,through analyzing the data collected in the two tests,the researcher finds the application of electronic portfolio improves vocational students'oral English competence significantly.Students achieve remarkable improvements in pronunciation&intonation,etc.,organization and expression of content,grammar standardization and adequacy.Secondly,through analyzing the data collected in the two questionnaires,the researcher finds the application of electronic portfolio exerts an positive effect on students' attitude in a certain extent,but the effect is not very satisfactory.According to the above results,the researcher drew the conclusions,discussed the positive and negative effects of the application of electronic portfolio to oral English teaching in vocational schools,pointed out the limitations of the study,and proposed suggestions for the further study.