Portfolios and Conferences

Portfolios and conferences are innovate and valuable methods of collecting data for evaluation. They offer a lot of opportunities to use language with teachers in way that seldom occur during regular class time. When they are used interactively can give students a sense of involvement in, control over, and enthusiasm for learning. But it must be taken into account that a special care should be taken by the teachers to ensure that these activities are used in student-centered, interactive ways; otherwise, the unique benefits of these methods will not be realized. 

Portfolio is a purposeful collection of student’s work that demonstrates to students and others their efforts, progress, and achievements in given areas. They can provide many benefits such as: A holistic view of student learning, opportunities for collaborative assessment, opportunities to use metalanguage to talk about language among others. In addition to this, it also promotes: student involvement is assessment, responsibility for self-assessment, collaborative haring classrooms, among others.

In the beginning, it is vital that teachers negotiate with students how you will jointly implement portfolios in your classroom. Portfolios are useful since they can keep samples of writing, lists of books, books reports, and so on. Although reviewing portfolios is time consuming, it helps you since they are more organized.

Conferences in comparison are often used to review the contents of portfolios. While portfolios whose primary benefits are related to assessment of achievement, conferences are advantageous for understanding the process, strategies, and approaches students use in the performance of school work. Then, the authors of this paper (Genesee & Upshur) do not recommend using conferences for grading purposes because grading generally focuses on learning outcomes or achievement, whereas the primary focus of conferences is process. I agree with them since there exists other methods of assessing language achievement for grading such as portfolios and tests which are more objective.