The Impact of Portfolio Assessment on Improving ESP Students’ Writing Skills

Background & Objective: The innovations in English language teaching has led to the change in the method of teaching writing from the traditional way of the end product-oriented approach to the process of creating writing. Therefore, there has also been progress in assessment procedures, which replace the summative assessment with the formative assessment. Portfolio assessment technique is an intentional collection of students ‘performance. This study aimed to investigate the impact of portfolio assessment on improving ESP students’ writing skills among ۷۰ Iranian nursing students in ESP classes.Materials & Methods: This study was carried out on two groups – experimental and control groups- each of which consists of ۳۵ students. Before the treatment, a pre-test was administered to both groups in order to investigate the writing performance and sub skills of learners of ESP. Throughout the study the experimental group was taught through portfolio assessment technique and the control group was taught through the traditional method. An independent samples t-test was applied in order to see whether there was a statistically significant difference or not between the groups. Additionally, a paired samples t-test was used so as to compare differences within each group.Findings: The results obtained from the post-test demonstrated that there was a statistically significant difference between the experimental and control groups in terms of the type of treatment, which signifies that portfolios had a statistically significant effect on improving writing performance and its sub skills in ESP classes. Conclusions: The portfolio is considered a useful tool both for instruction and assessment. Properly designed and implemented, it provides authentic language material for assessment, increases learners’ involvement in learning process and promotes self-reflection.

کلیدواژه ها:

portfolio assessment ، writing performance ، English for Specific Purposes (ESP) ، medical education