Portfolios and Process Writing: A Practical Approach
Simon Rea Institute for Business Languages, University of Linz, (Linz, Austria)
Introduction
A simple search of the Internet using the key words "language portfolios" and "portfolio assessment" shows how popular these concepts are in educational circles: the former produced about 150,000 mostly European-based hits and the latter about 250,000 mostly US-based hits. Many of these articles naturally link portfolios with personal skills like reflection. Many practitioners (see for example Santos` 1997 about Japanese students) would agree about the links but bemoan the lack of training and opportunity their students have had to develop such skills. The author`s own teaching experiences in Japan, New Zealand, Central Europe and the UK also suggests that such problems are not to limited to Asian teaching situations. For some this means that they consider a portfolio approach to be unworkable in their teaching situation. They find a gap between what they believe could be a helpful pedagogical approach and what their students actually do. This article aims to bridge that gap by showing how the positive benefits of portfolios and reflection can be integrated into a process writing course without causing a critical overload on the instructors` time resources. This will be done by describing their place in a university-level process writing course called Text Production (TP).
Course Background
The TP course consists of 21 contact hours which are divided into 14 blocks of 1 1/2 hours and is taught on a weekly basis. The final teaching block comprises the interviews. The students are generally in the third semesters of their studies and there can be up to 30 students in each class. As part of the course requirements the students are expected to produce a typewritten report of about eight A4 pages (excluding bibliography and notes). The final grade is based on this dossier, homework grades, participation in class work, a writing journal and a portfolio which the students themselves select and discuss with the instructor in a final interview discussion.
In common with many ESL writing courses (see for example Flowerdew 1993 or Kay and Dudley-Evans 1998), students are familiarised with insights of the genre approach and given practice in producing different academic (Swales 1990) and professional genres (Bhatia 1993). In common with much process writing instruction, the course also emphasises methods which help the students to become aware of writing as a process (see for example White and Arndt 1991, Raimes 1992). In the TP course, these include practice in and direct teaching about generating and planning techniques such as brainstorming and concept mapping. Students are also given an article (Rea 2000) and short content-based inputs about writing as a process. These theoretical inputs are linked to the tape of a think-aloud protocol of a short text being written which the students listen to and then talk about.
Text reformulation (Cohen 1983, Allwright et al 1988) is used to encourage students to look at their own writing critically. In a first stage, the students work on set texts, including introductions and conclusions of dossiers from previous years, which are read, corrected for surface level errors and then rewritten. They do this first as individuals and then discuss the results as a whole group. Following this, the students read and rewrite different sections of each other`s texts, using the insights they have gained from the class discussions. After that they go on to re-formulate their own work based on the insights of their colleagues (and the instructors) rather than just correct it for grammar and spelling mistakes. Reformulation obviously helps students to become aware of external readers and this is reinforced with video and text-based input (Littlewood 1994).
Journal writing and fastwrites are also integral parts of the course. In both activities the students can prepare for the final interview without being aware that they are doing so because both activities can by their very nature be very reflective. There are two compulsory fastwrites. Both take seven minutes and are on the topic "How I write ...". One is written in the first meeting and the other in the final professional writing workshop. These very often show the development of the students` writing skills. Some students use fastwrites in their writing journals too.
The writing journal is a kind of "personal diary" (cf Raimes 1992) where the students can write about their experiences and feelings about writing in general and this course in particular. Students are told that it has two main purposes, namely to make students feel at ease writing in English and to give them the chance to express themselves. For these reasons, it does not have the relatively tight structure recommended for example by Nunan (1988) who suggests a number of questions which students should answer about their learning. This is because the diary aims to help the students overcome "writing anxiety", as well as to help them focus on their learning processes. It does this by modelling the type of writing students can do in the way the activity is introduced and in the fast writes. They are expected to spend about five to ten minutes a day (or 30-60 minutes a week) on this writing. The journal can be written by hand or with the