The fact that most students (from primary to high school) in my school focus on speaking as the goal of their learning English and neglect their writing ability motivated me to seek for the way to improve the condition. The major reason for them doing this is that writing is very difficult, since it deals with so many grammatical rules. It seems that the students have lost their eagerness to write or to learn to write. To build up the eagerness, a portfolio is the one that I believe will make the students have different experiences in writing.
A portfolio, as stated by Hamp-Lyons and Condon (2000), provides students with abundant amount of time to produce their best writing pieces without being under pressure. Furthermore, a portfolio also encourages the students to try harder, not just produce a quick short and shallow text and work on correcting their misspelling or grammatical mistakes.
I started my research by choosing the primary students as my targets because they have a greater facility for understanding and imitating what they hear than the secondary school students, they are less suspicious of new things and are very curious to learn something new (Brewster et al, 2003). The importance of making good study habits has to be taught at the earliest age.
The research aimed to evaluate the implementation of a writing portfolio in a primary classroom. It tried to investigate whether the writing portfolio was applicable for primary students in Indonesia, and also whether the portfolio gave positive effect in improving the primary students’ writing ability.
The data evaluated were taken from the results of the pre and post tests, the students’ writing artifacts, the students’ self-assessment and reflection, classroom observations and informal interviews. The first analysis using the results of the students’ self-assessment and reflection, classroom observations and informal interviews, was intended to find out the possibility of implementing a portfolio in helping the students with their writing lessons. The second analysis using the results of the pre and post tests, together with the results of the students’ writing artifacts, was to find out whether there was a significant improvement in the students’ writing ability.
The research findings revealed that the writing portfolio was applicable for the primary students in terms of doing the three basic steps; collection, reflection and selection (Hamp-Lyons and Condon, 2000). 61% of the students gave positive responses to their next writing goals in their self-reflection; such as they wanted to write better than now, would do the task better and got better score too, because the writing was exciting indeed. Moreover, another 33% mentioned more specific goals; such as they wanted to write story about their graduation, to make comic books to share their experiences, or they wanted to have better handwriting and always to be careful when they wrote.
For the second question, the findings proved that the portfolio gave positive effect in improving the students’ writing. There was a point difference of 26 between the average score from before the treatment and after the treatment. About 68% of improvement in the number of students who could pass the school standard score, and 51% of improvement in the number of students who obtained scores above 75. |