The effect of portfolio-keeping on EFL young learners' writing achievement and their motivation towards writing

Abstract

The common view that writing skill in a foreign language is difficult to acquire may lead to loss of motivation and, therefore, lack of success among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Portfolio application as an alternative method in foreign language teaching may alleviate such a problem and appear as an effective means to increase students' motivation and success levels in EFL writing classes. Its application, therefore, needs to be disseminated in teaching English in the Turkish context. With such a purpose, this study aims to investigate the effect of portfolio-keeping on young learner's writing motivation and also writing achievement in teaching English as a foreign language to young learners in a public middle school in the Denizli province during the 2018-2019 academic year with 30 7th grade students. The present study represents a quasi-experimental research design as a four-month portfolio application was carried out with 15 experimental group participants while the control group of the same size did not receive a specific treatment. The quantitative data obtained through a writing motivation survey and pre- and post-writing tasks in the study were supported by qualitative data through interviews held with the participants in the experimental group. The questionnaires and pre- and post-tasks were analyzed through the SPSS 22.0 statistical package and the interviews through content analysis. The quantitative data of the study indicate that portfolio-keeping can be used to increase young learners' both writing motivation and achievement in English language teaching. The quantitative data also suggest that portfolio application can improve students' writing sub-skills such as focus, elaboration, organization, conventions and vocabulary while the portfolio-keeping has improved students' focus and elaboration sub-skills the most and convention sub-skill the least. On the other hand, qualitative data collected from the interviews showed that the participants held positive attitudes towards portfolio application and also they developed their research skills, increased success in exams, and improved the use of sentence structure, vocabulary, spelling, and conjunctions. However, some participants reported finding appropriate vocabulary and organizing paragraphs as problems related to portfolio-keeping tasks. © 2020 Karadeniz Technical University. All rights reserved.