AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE EFFICIENCY OF WRITING PORTFOLIOS AND STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS IN ACADEMIC CONTEXT

Abstract

Evaluating students’ achievement in regard to their writing skills in-progress has been a challenging issue for L2 English teachers. As one of the leading formative assessment techniques, portfolio writing has been used by language teachers for a long time. However, the efficiency of this technique still remains controversial for both language teachers and L2 researchers in terms of students’ improvement in writing in addition to their reflections upon this formative assessment tool. Thus, this research aimed to measure the effectiveness of writing portfolio for the L2 learners of English in relation to their reviews on its usefulness. Accordingly, as an outcome of purposive sampling, I examined 24 students of English Preparatory School in a foundation university in Turkey, studying a variety of subjects, in relevance to their level of English proficiency and in-progress competence in terms of subject-verb agreement rule throughout one semester. Since writing portfolios are constructed as a means of assessing the process instead of evaluating the final performance, the data from students was collected every week. I also conduct an interview with the students, regarding their reflections and attitudes towards the efficiency of portfolio assessment. Therefore, this research used a mixture of Qualitative and Quantitative Methods. In order to analyze the data, I will utilize Microsoft Excel. The results indicated that the overall performances of students who performed better than others coincide with their perceptions based on their answers to survey interview. Students made substantial progress in regard to their implementation of SV Agreement rule. Hence, writing portfolios are perceived as useful tools by learners and their perceptions are parallel with their improvement