15th. Class - Portfolios -- Communicative Approach2

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Date Posted: 14:11:07 08/09/03 Sat
Author: Maria Isabel Avila Martins
Subject: 15th. Class - Portfolios

Portfolios
15th. Class

Portfolios resulted from the needs of alternative forms of measuring the process of student�s learning. Traditional approaches were not able for assessing student�s skills sufficiently and effectively because language performance depended much on the purposes for which the students were using the language and on the context in which it was done.
Portfolios were then developed with the purpose to document the student�s growth during an extended period of time in the classroom setting. Its main purpose is to show the student�s progress through a way that he could be able to do self-analysis critically and have evidences of his work. Being so, students become more independent thinkers and their autonomy as learners is facilitated.
Portfolios can bring benefits to the students, to the teachers and also to the student�s parents. Concerning the students, portfolios call for their involvement in planning assessment, interpreting the results of their assessment and also in self-evaluation. They also provide students with opportunities to display their good work and demonstrate their mastery of a foreign language. Portfolios are useful for teachers once they provide them with information that can help them make decisions about curriculum. It also provide them with a wide range of evidence on which to judge whether students are becoming more competent or not. For parents, portfolios serve better to show the student�s perfomance in more detail, rather than an abstract number or grade.
For the usage of a portfolio become a success it is essential that it captures, in many ways as possible, the learner�s use of the target language. So it must be very well planned by the teacher before the students start handling it. Hence, what to place in a portfolio and how to do that is of great importance, and for that being so, two considerations must be taken into account: the portfolio�s purpose and audience.
Depending on the purpose, a portfolio could have any of the following items: samples of creative work; tests; quizzes; homeworks; projects and assignments; audiotapes of oral work; student diary entries; log of work on a particular assignment; self-assessments; comments from peers and comments from teachers.
A project funded by the California Department of Education to evaluate Model Projects in Less Commonly Taught Foreign Languages in California Public Schools, suggested some helpful guidelines to be implemented on foreign language instruction, as follows:
� Students should make annotations describing the activity they are engaged in.
� All entries in the portfolio must be dated and numbered chronologically.
� In order to include information on students� listening comprehension, teachers must include audio or video tapes, listening comprehension tests or other artifacts used to getting information on the student�s ability to listen with understanding.
� Spontaneous target language speech samples could also be documented by audio or videotapes.
� Not only the writing of stories or narratives are important, but also the drafts of writing samples are as important as the final written product.
� Materials should be added to the portfolio at least once a month.

Aug.9th., 2003.

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Replies:

Re: 15th. Class - Portfolios -- Vera Menezes, 15:02:17 08/13/03 Wed