Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 3; May 2000

by Pirjo Pollari
Teacher Training School, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Throughout the working process the student felt that this kind of a working method was not for her: she was afraid that she would not be able to assume the responsibility and would not therefore be able to finish her pieces on time. She also pointed out that her English was not good enough for independent work. Nevertheless, she started working immediately and worked rather systematically every week. Consequently, she completed all her work - also the prologue, epilogue and self-assessments - well in time.

The student seemed very error-centered: nearly all her comments dealt with her "bad English" or grammatical mistakes. On the whole, the student was very discontented with her work. She introduced herself and her work in the prologue as follows:

I have to studied in English nine years. Still I am ignorant of the language. My works are very terrible.

Most of the pieces in her portfolio - a portrait, a record review, an essay about Sting's concert and a film review - were rather short, approximately 150 - 200 words long. Because she considered her work so poor, she had refused to show any of her pieces to the teacher for feedback during the working process.

All in all, the portfolio approach did not seem to suit this student. She drudged alone, very stressed and worried about the responsibility and the quality of her work, but still declining others' help. Moreover, the portfolio approach also appeared to discourage and disempower her as a learner and user of English:

This course made me once again conscious of the fact that I don't know any English, and I most probably will never even learn.

Easy Living

A stark contrast to the constant anxiety of the Misery student was presented by five male students who took the course rather lightly in terms of effort invested in it but who also liked the course, mainly because of its easiness. This student is one of them:

Making the portfolio was actually very easy. I have nothing to complain about that, but sometimes I wish I could do something challenging.

At the beginning of the portfolio course the student had rather ambitious and original plans, but about two weeks later he abandoned them because they had proved too difficult. Instead, he wrote four essays: a portrait of Giger's art, an essay on science fiction and "the feeling that Sci-Fi gives me", a film review and an essay on TV commercials. All the pieces were about 300-400 words long: they were fluent but somehow a little unpolished. The student's logbook conveys the feeling that he had produced the pieces rather effortlessly, without a long working process or very much deliberation. He did not seem to aim at perfection, nor at extending or expanding his skills:

"I reckoned that the level in here didn't need to be awfully high, I just wrote like ordinary English essays, essays of 300-400 words."

Also, there was very little self-assessment in the portfolio: for instance, the student did not select any of his pieces for the final assessment. It seemed that he had felt that it was enough to produce the required pieces to demonstrate his English skills - everything else was unnecessary.

However, the student seemed a little disappointed with his effort during the portfolio course. He had planned to produce a better portfolio but he was "too lazy" and somehow he lost interest:

"A lazy student is lazy and a hard-working one is always hard-working."

He also offered another reason for his lack of effort: he suspected that good students - like himself - would not invest any more work in their portfolios than was necessary to demonstrate their skills and to get a good enough grade:

"They know that they are good at English and so they don't bother to put that much effort or work into it - at least I didn't - in my opinion I'm good enough at English for a senior secondary school student."

The Opponents: Portfolio is hell

Finally, there were nine students, all male, who neither liked the portfolio course nor really tried to work very actively or responsibly. The students' previous success in English did not seem to account for their dislike: their previous grades ranged somewhat evenly between poor and very good. However, seven out of these nine students were in the same English group:

"Well, there was somehow an impression about it nearly in the whole group that it just didn't really sort of interest us."

Among the nine students, the attitudes towards the portfolio approach varied from slightly negative to strongly negative:

The course wasn't very rewarding or productive for me, which, of course, was mostly because I'm neither very cultural nor very hardworking.

What do I have to say about this course? To answer that question would take more foul, unprintable words than I could write so I leave them out now.

Furthermore, the amount of effort and time invested in this course varied; some students were perhaps a little ashamed of their laziness, whereas some nearly boasted of how little time they had used.

"Personally, it's not for me, I'm that much lazy a person."

When somebody evaluates my works, I hope she'll notice how little time I used. I think that my works are almost good for works made in that little time.

Most of these students disliked culture as a topic and, moreover, they felt that they had not learnt much, if anything.

I don't really know about learning anything new, perhaps my writing may have improved a bit.
A complete waste of time. Students are forced to produce utterly senseless pieces of work about uninteresting topics. The whole course was totally useless because you don't learn anything here but, instead, you use the things you already know.

Many of these students doubted their own diligence and responsibility in taking charge of their studies. However, they seemed to regard their English skills as reasonably good in actual practice. All in all, they preferred teacher-directed teaching because they experienced it either easier or more effective: the portfolio approach simple was not to their liking:

I don't recommend this kind of study method (as an experiment, a change or not even to revenge the wrong doing I was submitted to) to anyone. This demands much too much work and still doesn't teach what I think we should learn at school. Thus, I absolutely prefer the traditional teacher-directed teaching. This isn't sensible for the teacher either, she'll have to correct all the stuff at the same time.

I demand a lot from the school 's English teaching because I consider language and their studies important. I know only one proper teaching method and that is not the portfolio.

Epilogue

The portfolio experiment taught us all that student-centered and self-directed learning is not an easy option. As the profiles and portraits above show, some students are more willing and also more able to accept responsibility for their own learning. The teacher's role as a facilitator or counselor of learning requires a lot from the teacher as well. The teacher should support, guide, encourage, and help whenever needed but, then again, refrain from guiding and controlling whenever her help is not called for. But it is not always easy to tell the difference.

Nevertheless, the teacher's new role can also be very rewarding. We teachers learnt to know our students better as persons, not only as students of English, and vice versa. We also learnt in actual practice that there are various ways of learning and teaching, and different ways may suit different people. Therefore, despite our difficulties, and our rather radically student-directed approach, we found the portfolio experiment a very positive experience.

But most importantly, a vast majority of our students found the portfolio approach a positive and refreshing opportunity to both direct their studies and demonstrate their skills in a more learner-centered manner. We all - both students and teachers - learnt to appreciate the potentials the students have, if only given a proper chance to be involved in the decision-making in order to find the goals, tasks and methods that suit them best.

The experiment has now become part of our everyday practice as we have continued the portfolio approach in the culture course year after year. And, inspired by our students' comments, we will go on:

For myself this course gave a lot of self confidence and I got a feeling that I can do something even though my grades are so bad.

Thank you for doing something differently.

Note: the students comments in italics were originally written in English, those in plain format have been translated from Finnish

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1990. Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper Perennial.

De Corte, E. Learning theory and instructional science. Paper presented at the Final Planning Workshop of the ESF-Program "Learning in Humans and Machines" in St. Gallen, Switzerland, March 5-6, 1993.

De Fina, A. 1992. Portfolio Assessment: Getting Started. New York: Scholastic Professional Books.

Paulson, F. L., Paulson, P. P. & C. A. Meyer. 1991. 'What makes a portfolio a portfolio?'Educational Leadership 48/5: 60-63.