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Education Sciences / 5. Modern Methods of Teaching

Ivanchenko T.U.

South-Russia State University of Economics and Services, Russia

Foreign Language Portfolios As The Students’ Assessment And Development Instrument

The wave of educational reforms has brought with it an increasing dissatisfaction with traditional approaches toward student assessment. Alternative method of assessment involving students in planning assessment, interpreting the results of assessment, and in self-assessment is the use of student portfolios.

Language portfolios have generated a good deal of interest in recent years, with teachers taking the lead in exploring ways to use them. A Language Portfolio is a collection of material describing the proficiency in one (or more) foreign language(s).

The European Language Portfolio (ELP) was developed by the Language Policy Division of the Council of Europe and soon launched in the Russian Federation. The purpose of it is: - to support the development of learner autonomy, plurilingualism and intercultural awareness and competence; - to allow users to record their language learning achievements and their experience of learning and using languages.

Teachers have integrated portfolios into instruction and assessment, gained administrative support, and answered their own as well as student, administrator, and parent questions about portfolio assessment. Concerns are often focused on reliability, validity, process, evaluation, and time. These concerns apply equally to other assessment instruments. There is no assessment instrument that meets every teacher's purpose perfectly, is entirely valid and reliable, takes no time to prepare, administer, or grade, and meets each student's learning style.

There are certain benefits for English language teachers and students of using a portfolio system in foreign language classes. First, if carefully administered, the portfolio system offers the foreign language students a supportive learning and assessment system based upon clearly stated criteria that combines alternative forms of language instruction, assessment, and feedback. Second, it provides a solution to catering to individual student needs within the heterogeneous class framework.

Besides, a portfolio gives foreign language teachers insight into their students’ strengths, weaknesses, and interests – information the teacher may not discover using regular teaching methods and standardized testing. The material in the portfolio allows the teacher to determine both the level of proficiency attained by the student in the foreign language classroom and the strategies used by her to assess her students' acquisition of the English language.

The portfolio also offers feedback to the teacher for improving the assessment process that will be useful for the multiple audiences for which the portfolio is prepared; that is, the teacher and the student, and perhaps, the student's parents.

The idea of the portfolio is to allow revisions and resubmissions of work for which the student receives written and one to one feedback. This system allows for students to focus on areas of language learning that need more attention and receive a form of individual instruction on those weaker areas.

More over, a wide range of skills may be shown by means of portfolio. For example, students who are more artistically inclined may use their abilities to illustrate their reading comprehension knowledge or those students who wish to write creatively, for instance, may show their deeper understanding of vocabulary items by composing a poem or short story.

As an alternative form of assessment, portfolio can be used by teachers alongside traditional testing methods, for example, students’ exams in less formal, pressurized surroundings. It gives them time to understand more deeply areas that need further attention and at the same time gives the teacher the chance to discover whether a student’s weaknesses might be due to the test conditions and not lack of language knowledge.

Thus, the portfolio is a useful teaching and learning tool in the foreign language classroom and it can give foreign language students the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge in a supportive framework that takes into account their individual needs.

Portfolios offer the teacher and student an in-depth knowledge of the student as a learner. This means that the teacher can individualize instruction for the student. Weak areas can be strengthened.

Portfolios gives a great opportunity in language interpersonal communication (student is engaged in conversations, provides and obtains information, expresses feelings and emotions, and exchanges opinions); interpretive communication (student understands and interprets written and spoken language on a variety of topics); presentational communication (student presents information, concepts, and ideas to an audience of listeners or readers on a variety of topics). There is a good deal of cultural practices (student demonstrates an understanding of the relationship between practices and perspectives of the culture studied).

Perhaps a portfolio's greatest potential lies in documenting and charting students' growth in proficiency in the four language skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Identifying appropriate means for demonstrating listening and speaking proficiency is not an easy task. So, there is the possibility of using audiotapes and videotapes as a means of providing evidence of listening and speaking skills.

The audio or video tapes may be dialogues that have to be memorized by the students and from which it is sometimes possible to determine whether the students in fact have mastered the language beyond the simple rote memorization of the script. If it is not possible to determine it, the audio or video tapes are useful in assessing accuracy of pronunciation in the target language, but not communicative competence.

The written samples in the portfolios also provide important information regarding the growth in the target language. Portfolios which contain numerous and dated writing samples prove to be very useful in assessing growth in writing ability in the target language. Some teachers include in the portfolio various drafts of students' writing assignments. These are especially valuable since they show the developmental stages of writing in the foreign language in response to their teacher's comments regarding their attempts to complete the written assignment.