Comments on: Process Portfolio Assessment for Beginner-Level Learners of Korean: Focusing on the Spoken Presentational Mode of Communication https://fltmag.com/process-portfolio-assessment/ IALLT's free language technology magazine Thu, 18 Jul 2024 23:48:38 +0000 hourly 1 By: Angela Lee-Smith https://fltmag.com/process-portfolio-assessment/#comment-300731 Tue, 07 Feb 2023 18:25:38 +0000 https://fltmag.com/?p=7442#comment-300731 Thank you for sharing your thoughtful reflection and experience on portfolios. I use the process portfolio in my classroom application as a progress portfolio, a purposeful collection of student work that documents student growth from the beginning of the semester to the end to see how each piece demonstrates their development toward the end goals. In this case, I focused on the mode of communication, particularly in presentational speaking.

I agree with your point on technology use: select one simple technology that students all feel comfortable using and is affordable.

Again, I greatly appreciate your encouraging and insightful comments! I learned much from you.

]]> By: Chris Fry, Barcelona https://fltmag.com/process-portfolio-assessment/#comment-300718 Tue, 07 Feb 2023 13:10:13 +0000 https://fltmag.com/?p=7442#comment-300718 Thank you very much for this fascinating article. It stimulated me to put down in writing my own thoughts about the subject of portfolios of spoken English.
I think ‘Process Portfolio’ means what I think of as a ‘repository portfolio’, that is one where everything the student produces is included, in contrast to a ‘display portfolio’, which only includes the best pieces of work as a way of showing their ability to their teacher or future teachers or employers.
Like my own examples of students collecting (and in a sense curating) their recordings, your students were only very rarely interacting with other students. On the other hand my students made almost all their recordings in class, and your students made almost all of theirs at home. Another difference is that mine were mostly speaking to another person and although they were essentially monologues, they had to make themselves understood by the other person.
A further difference is that my students made dozens and dozens of recordings and in one or two cases, hundreds!
The way you used the recordings was different, too. I think the most important difference was that in my case my students had to choose their best recording every week or two weeks and I listened to just one minute of it in detail and gave them, probably, an over-abundance of feedback as text and audio for pronunciation.
I tried to at least listen to all the other recordings on the underground on my way to work using Feedly to offer me the latest recordings of each class. Here I simply left a few very brief comments, in a way to let them know that I was listening to them.
However the principal difference is that although my students often recorded two versions of their monologues, they didn’t, except in one or two cases, make a well-prepared version out of class. In your study students were encouraged to prepare their recordings as well as possible, probably recording themselves various times before being satisfied with the result. This was the procedure that I followed as a student when I had to send my recordings to the teacher for assessment of my spoken Catalan. The idea is that you can’t read your monologue aloud, but I must admit that using very full notes makes it much easier although technically it is not reading aloud!
A great advantage of this study in Korea is that the tasks were much more varied than the tasks my students had to do, which were principally the retelling of things they had listened to in class. My students were at a higher level: A2 and B1, but I think they might have enjoyed doing some of the tasks your Korean students did.
My students did their work 10 to 7 years ago and tools for recording have changed in that time or at least the ones my students used have all disappeared: Posterous, iPadio, and AudioBoo. However, the tools that have surfaced since then are magnificent: Padlet, VoiceThread. Flip, YouTube, and many others that you didn’t mention, like Wakelet, Anchor, Spreaker, Podbean and others.
I am particularly attracted to Padlet as it allows direct recording of audio using iOS or Android devices. It also offers the concept of a timeline, which seems to be the most appropriate format for an eportfolio. It also offers users a way to create a eportfolio of everything and another with only the best/selected recordings that could be used for formative assessment or proof of progress to the students themselves, to their teacher or to parents. It would also allow for peer interaction either as peer-assessment or out of interest, a bit like a blog.
I realize that there are many ways that teachers could ask their students to present their work, but there is an advantage all round in picking one tool and normalising its use, so everyone becomes proficient at using it and it becomes second nature.
From the teachers point of view, Feedly still works well as an aggregator, which means it is very easy for teachers to follow students’ Padlets, arrange them in classes and listen to them to whatever extent they have time. It would be possible to follow the two Padlets I propose that each student should create, but to store them in different folders so with limited time available, the teacher can concentrate on the selected/best ones.
I like, too, the idea of providing students with a list of criteria for them to use as a way of assessing and reflecting on their different attempts, although I’m not sure I would use exactly the same criteria, which of course are also the criteria for the teacher’s assessment.
As my own concluding thoughts, I would like to emphasise that the whole idea of working with portfolios of spoken English is to redress the balance of aims and evaluation from written production to spoken production, and from accuracy to fluency, which for most of my students is what they mean when they say they want to master English. I wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water, though and would suggest doing something similar with the students’ writing, where it is easier and more appropriate to concentrate more on accuracy of grammar and vocabulary. Perhaps, spoken English lends itself better to assessing communication and pronunciation and intonation. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t given my students so much feedback on grammar and vocabulary problems!

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