The Study of Portfolio Assessment on EFL Students' English Reading

Abstract

In Taiwan, English teachers usually use the traditional assessment to test the students' level of reading comprehension such as the traditional multiple-choice tests have been mainly adopted to evaluate students' reading ability and students are usually asked to answer the questions with "standard answers”, rather than think over the questions critically and give responses rationally (Jasmine, 1992 & Yeh, 2000). A scholar pointed out portfolio is a tool of documenting students' academic accomplishments for examining students' knowledge (Meyer, 1992). Moreover, the portfolio assessment is almost used in English writing class (Tsai, 2005), but the studies of portfolio assessment on English reading are lacked. Teachers might notice that the procedure of students' learning and understand what problems or difficulties students could have about English learning. Some scholars indicated that one of advantages of portfolio assessment is to assist students to realize their own strengths and weaknesses in reading process (Cunningham, 1999). Therefore, the purpose of this study aimed to investigate the effects of portfolio assessment on students' English reading ability. The quantitative and qualitative research designs were applied in this study. The questionnaire focused on three aspects that are reflection of reading competence and reading portfolio assessment, the comparison between portfolio assessment and traditional assessment and a review of portfolio assessment. The participants of this study were 71 sophomores who are all English majors. Besides, ten students from 71 participants, were to be interviewed voluntarily. Instructional implications for EFL educator to apply effectively the portfolio assessment using in reading class are presented.