FbG as an around the clock support for an essay writing course amidst the pandemic

This study aimed to explore the potential of Facebook Group (FbG) for teaching essay writing skills in the period of social distancing due to covid-19 pandemic. The study involved three groups of students who had been attending Essay Writing Course. Data was collected through questionnaires, interview, home assignments, and documents. Questionnaires were distributed via Google Form. Interviews were conducted with students through WhatsApp chats and calls. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse data obtained from closed questionnaires, home assignments, and mid-term test. Data from open questionnaires, interviews, and documents was analysed using qualitative inductive approach to identifying themes � topics, ideas, and patters of meaning. Study findings indicated that FbG has been an appropriate place for developing essay writing skills amidst the pandemic. FbG as networking site has made possible an effective, efficient, and practical essay writing learning for the following reasons.� Firstly, FbG discussion forum provided invaluable learning input. Secondly, FbG was easy to operate. The students could learn independently at their own pace.� Lastly, use of FbG brought them convenience and raised confidence to better engage in learning online. FbG has supported students� essay writing learning process that has led to good writing performance. This can be seen not only from the conducive learning process in comparison to traditional classroom instruction prior to the pandemic, but also from learning outcome apparently observed in writing portfolios as well as mid-term test.

Building protfolios in teaching literature arts forwards developing students’ competency

The objectives of Language Arts and Literature in General Education Curriculum are ahered to developing students’ competency and quality. Accordingly, the diversity of teaching methods and techniques is considered as an apporirate pathway to educational innovativons from basic to comprehensive in the 21st century. Strengthening learning activities for students therefore become essential. And designing learning portfolios in the teaching of Language Arts and Literature is one of the useful ways to enhance learning activities for students; consequently, students’ compentency and quality are sharpened. Based on theoretical basis on portfolios, designing processes, designing purposes and their usage of reading portfolios, writing portfolios and E-portfolios are built in order to strengthen students’ learning autonomy. The findings show that building eanring portfolios is definitely suitable to contemporary teaching perspectives and its application to teaching and learning environment at high school sounds fruitful.

Review of Research on Portfolios in ESL/EFL Context

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. This article mainly reviews the empirical research on portfolios in ESL/EFL context and offers suggestions for future research. The article starts by providing a brief introduction to portfolio and the framework for systematically designing and implementing portfolio assessment in the classroom. Then it reviews the empirical studies of portfolios in ESL/EFL context from three perspectives, i.e. portfolio assessment on writing, portfolios as a means to promote autonomy and e-portfolios. The article concludes by emphasizing the benefits of portfolios in language learning, indicating challenges in carrying out portfolio assessment, and providing suggestions for future research.

Using Writing Portfolios to Assess Course Learning Outcomes in a Jordanian University

Portfolios were used to assess cognitive and affective course learning outcomes in an undergraduate writing program at a private university in Jordan. A convenience sample of twenty-one male and female Arab EFL/ESL freshmen, wrote short weekly assignments over a fifteen-week semester, made regular diary entries about their writing and leisure reading, and wrote a short children's story. These were not graded but students received prompt feedback. At semester’s end, they collected their work in a portfolio and wrote a final evidence-based reflection, in which they analysed their strengths and weaknesses in writing. These portfolios were graded based on their inclusion of regularly submitted written work, evidence of their response to given feedback and their analysis of their progress in writing. Using qualitative data analysis based on the grounded theory method, students’ reflections were mined for rich data, concepts were labelled and emerging categories were identified. These codes were further analysed in more depth, using cognitive and affective taxonomies, which showed that the course outcomes had been met. Recommendations are made for greater use of portfolio assessment at tertiary level in Jordan.

Chilean Pre-Service Teachers’ Perceptions Towards Benefits and Challenges of EFL Writing Portfolios

Although keeping writing portfolios has proved to be a successful strategy in developing writing skills in English as a foreign language, few studies have focused on pre-service teachers at the pre-intermediate level. This study aims to describe pre-service teachers’ perceptions towards portfolio keeping. The sample consisted of 51 first-year students from an initial English language teacher education programme at a university in Southern Chile. A writing portfolio-based class was implemented over a seventeen-week period. Data were collected through an adapted questionnaire and a focus group conducted at the end of term. Results show that pre-service teachers value the strategy; they perceive they have improved their writing and reflection skills. They also draw attention to some challenges to be considered in the planning and implementation phases of the strategy.

Using Competency-Based Learning to Improve Clinical Skills

This chapter serves to provide medical educators with an overview of competency-based education (CBME) and the clinical skills necessary for medical school graduate. Technology that supports the teaching, learning, and assessment of CBME and clinical skills is defined and examples are provided for each of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) core competencies. The competencies are defined, and clinical skills embedded in each are highlighted. This chapter provides a summary of the useful technological tools and provides examples of medical schools that use technology to teach and assess CBME with these tools. Online teaching or eLearning, simulation, online assessment, virtual humans, the electronic health record, gaming, procedural software, discussion boards, reflective writing, portfolios, and telemedicine programs are covered in detail.

“No Facts Equals Unconvincing”: Fact and Opinion as Conceptual Tools in High School Students’ Written Arguments

In this study, I present a qualitative analysis of 11 writing portfolios drawn from a yearlong instructional program designed to apprentice students into the practices of argumentative writing typical of early-college coursework in the United States. The students’ formal and informal writings were parsed into utterances and coded along two developmental dimensions: reciprocity, or the extent to which each utterance answered to the immediate context in which it was generated; and indexicality, or the extent to which each utterance evidenced modes of reasoning that reflect the conventions of academic argumentation. My analysis found that although students’ writing evidenced a high degree of reciprocity, they frequently employed nonacademic modes of reasoning. Focusing on a subset of utterances, I show how their tacit orientations toward the concepts of fact and opinion limited the extent to which their reasoning satisfied the evidentiary expectations of formal academic discourse. This discovery suggests that students’ development as writers of academic arguments is closely linked to their formal instruction in argumentative writing as well as to their tacit understandings of concepts fundamental to argumentation. Moreover, these findings highlight important distinctions between formal and informal reasoning and how those distinctions may be implicated in both curriculum and instruction.