A study on the application of writing portfolio technique to second year English majors: an action research project at Hanoi college of commerce and tourism

Abstract

This action research explores the effects of writing portfolio technique on second year students’writing skill and the possible challenges encountering by both teachers and students during the application process. Students created portfolios by including all the final drafts and rough drafts into a folder; and together with students’ submitted portfolios, two sets of questionnaires: pre and post-portfolio questionnaires, and interviews are also used to collect the data for the research. The findings showed that the portfolio technique not only helped to improve students’ writing skill, especially in terms of vocabulary, and grammar, which meet student’s demands but also changed students’ attitude to the writing skill positively and contributed to the development of students’ other skills such as commenting, editing, reading, internet using, and group work skill as well. However, during the process, there happened some problems. For example, this method requires students to give written feedbacks to each other, which is quite challenging to them. Especially, students quite easily got demotivated by negative comments from their peers. Or, students felt boring and tiring when having to write up to three drafts for the same topics. Nevertheless, the benefits of this technique outweigh all and prove to be effective in helping students learning writing.