1.1 Background of the Study
As one of basic language skills in learning English, writing is of great importanceto reflect objectively the learner’s integrative language proficiency, and writinginstruction is considered to be the essential but most difficult part in English Teaching.How to improve writing instruction quality with effective teaching methods as well asscientific assessments has been a hot topic in the field of English education. Due to itsnature of being a process, writing instruction needs an overall and continuousassessment to validly examine the learner’s language proficiency.CollegesIt attached great importance to writing in Teaching Objectives for VocationalCollege with detailed requirements as follows: Non-English majors in VocationalColleges are expected to complete a composition based on a given topic (usually asimple practical writing, such as a form or document, a letter, resume or notice) of80-100 words within 30 minutes, to express the idea clearly without obvious errors informat, word-spelling, grammar or sentence structures. Nevertheless, currentlyspeaking, writing is an essential but the most difficult part in English instruction fornon-English majors in Vocational Colleges.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
It can be seen that traditional summative assessment is actually the main coursefor the ineffectiveness of writing instruction for non-English majors in VocationalColleges. Therefore the current situation of writing instruction in Vocational Collegescalls for an overall and continuous assessment that is scientific and effective for areplace.This paper aims to seek for a more scientific and effective teaching methodtogether with a new scientific and effective assessment, to arouse the students’ interestand enthusiasm in English writing, cultivate their self-reflective thinking andautonomic learning, and thus to obtain the real objectives of teaching for Non-Englishmajors in Vocational Colleges.Different from the traditional summative assessment, formative assessment—anoverall and continuous assessment—is considered to be what we need being morescientific and effective with the focus on the process instead of the only result. Amongthe formative assessments, portfolios are one of the widely-applied and well-receivedinstrument. Generally speaking, a portfolio is a systematic collection of teacher’sobservations and students’ products to reflect the students’ efforts, progress anddevelopmental status in the process of learning (Paulson, F.L. Paulson, RR. andMeyer, CA,1991). It consists of the students’ writing samples, their self-assessment,their reflections, the peer feed-backs as well as the teacher’s feed-backs, in all ofwhich we can find obvious its advantages that can’t not be seen in traditionalsummative assessments.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
This chapter is a review of literature drawn from some fields related to the study,which consists of four sections: 1) historical Background of Writing Assessment; 2)overview of portfolio-based assessment; 3) theoretical Foundations of the Study; 4)recent Studies of Portfolio-based Writing Assessment at home and abroad.
2.1 Historical Background of Writing Assessment
Modern educational assessment is said to have gone through four stages in theteaching field: measurement stage, description stage, judgment stage, and socialconstruction stage. (Yang Yijun, et. al., 1988)At the measurement stage (late 19th century--1930s) it is believed that “ anythingthat exists is in amount, and anything that exists in amount can be measured” (Wang1999) and put emphasis on standardized measurement of learners’ basic knowledgeand skills. In this stage learners are assessed by testing their learning results onlythrough their external behaviors, which is not sufficient for to obtain necessaryinformation on the scope of learners’ knowledge or the levels of their development.As representative of description stage, R.W. Tyler (1930s--1
