The Impact of Portfolio Assessment on the Accuracy and Complexity of TEFL Postgraduate Students Writing

This quasi-experimental study examined the impact of portfolio assessment (PA) on the accuracy and complexity of postgraduate TEFL students’ writing. It was hypothesized that engaging learners in the process of assessing their performance can focus their attention on formal and textual features and thereby promote their writing. 40 intermediate TEFL postgraduate students, selected from a population of 50 taking the “Advanced Writing Course” at Islamic Azad University, Tabriz Branch, participated in the study and were randomly assigned as the control and experimental groups after their homogeneity was assessed based on a Preliminary English Test (PET) and a writing test. Both groups received process-oriented instruction based on the same teaching materials for 12 sessions and underwent a process-oriented teaching approach complemented by interactive feedback, peer-editing, and teacher’s feedback on their writing samples. The experimental group was additionally engaged in weekly PA of their wiring. The paired samples t-test analysis of their writing post-test revealed that the experimental group surpassed the control group and produced more accurate and complex texts. The results accentuate the significance of engaging postgraduate TEFL students not only in the learning process but also in the process of evaluating their own progress over time, and offer pedagogical implications.