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THE EFFECTIVENESS OF E-PORTFOLIO AS A LEARNING TOOL IN AN EFL

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 THE EFFECTIVENESS OF E-PORTFOLIO AS A
LEARNING TOOL IN AN EFL WRITING CLASS
Mr. NGUYEN TRONG NHAN
VUS English Center
Mr. NGUYEN MINH TRI
Nguyen Tat Thanh University
ABSTRACT
Learner autonomy is considered integral to contribute to the
effectiveness of knowledge acquisition thanks to their involvement in
self-study, self-preparation and exploration, especially in writing, the
most complicated language skill. Writing required learners to be in
possession of a huge volume of background knowledge, language
competency, and critical analysis to produce a concise and concrete
version of academic writing. In addition, the modern teaching methods
are utilizing electronic portfolio (E-Portfolio) as the proof of learners’
progression, self-assessment and accomplishment. This paper aims to
apply E-portfolio to grade the level of autonomy in language acquisition
among 20 teenage learners at a VUS Center in Vietnam. The data was
collected through E-portfolio, classroom observation and researcher’s
critical analysis in the presence of mixed methods. The findings revealed
E-portfolio showed its effectiveness in encouraging learners’ autonomy
in language learning. Learners’ competency, assignment completion and
classroom participations were indicated for assessment on the E-
portfolio that was available for students to keep track.
Keywords: autonomy, academic writing, e-portfolio, assessment
INTRODUCTION
The current era has witnessed the transformation in language education
from teacher-based approach to student-based approach due to the
demand for world integration. Language learning is supposed to play a
crucial role in equipping young students with the ability to master
language proficiency to fulfil the market requirement. On the contrary
to traditional teaching methods that mainly focus on teaching
grammatical structures or lexical resource with passive acquisition
from learners, the modern approach creates more opportunities for
learners to actively lead the learning process. As a result, they are able

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to profoundly comprehend lesson delivery in an effective and creative
way to reach communicative levels in their foreign language learning.
Writing is deemed to be the most difficult and complicated skill that
most of learners are believed to spend a huge volume of time and effort
to study. In particular, writing components consist of grammatical range
and accuracy, chunks, phrasal verbs, idioms, vocabulary, and so on. They
are to some extent challenging to learner to reach communicative level
(Bello, 1997). Therefore, teaching writing is mandatory and complex
because students do not deal with only sentences but also critical
thinking, coherence, idea organization.
Along with the development of digital world, information exchange has
grown in popularity in language education. It provides learners with
innovative and effective methods to stimulate learning effectiveness.
Electronic portfolio or E-portfolio is widely applied in English teaching
as an alternative medium of assessment instead of traditional
techniques. It is utilized to assess learners’ progressive development
within the learning process to exhibit their effort, achievements and
limitations in English acquisition (Arter and Spandel, 1992). Hence,
teachers can assess learners’ performance and other untestable
elements in their study of the course.
It is undeniable that learners are significantly the key factor to decide
the success in language education; however, in the context of VUS center
at the research site, the degree of learner autonomy is considered
limited to some extent due to the limited amount of class time and the
abundance of their school work of the high school. Learners have shown
their tiredness and boredom when they attend the class on a frequent
basis. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the application of E-
portfolio as a learning tool an EFL writing class at VUS center.
In regards to the aforementioned situation, the study attempts to
answer the following research question:
How effective is the application of E-portfolio as a learning tool in
academic writing context of teenage learners?
This research question is specified into three sub-questions:
1. What is the development in learner autonomy with the
implementation of e-portfolio?
2. How effective is e-portfolio on enhancing learners’ writing skill?
3. What are learners’ attitude towards the use of e-portfolio in the
writing class?

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LITERATURE REVIEW
The significance of E-portfolio
Traditional summative assessment has shown its limitations with the
focus on the outcomes of learners in the absence of progressive analysis
in learning process. The final examinations are influenced by several
distractors of testing environments and internal factors of candidates,
examiners or even invigilators. Therefore, they are incapable of
indicating the strengths and weaknesses of students during the learning
process. In contrast, the application of formative assessment thanks to
portfolio is promising for teachers to observe and assess learners in a
better way. E-portfolio or Electronic portfolio is a collection of data to
show learners’ efforts, achievements, and progress during learning
process (Norton & Wiburg, 1998). In this method, students’
performance, preparation, outcomes are presented in documents of
papers and folders that are available for both teachers and learners to
get access to. Every lesson and classroom activity are recorded as an
evidence of teaching and learning effectiveness. After a certain period of
time, both teachers and learners can look back their activities to re-
consider the process of language acquisition. In addition, E-portfolio is
a platform for teacher-student interactions via discussion, feedback,
questions and responses regardless of geographical locations or time
zones.
Lorenzo and Ittelson (2005) pointed out six key benefits of applying E-
portfolio in language classrooms:
 To build the syllabus for the program
 To record learners’ competency, comprehension, skills
 To keep track with learners’ developmental process
 To find job opportunities or tasks that are suitable for their
levels
 To assess the efficiency of the entire course
 To evaluate learners’ performance during the course
From constructive perspective, learning process and outcomes are
supposed to be arranged in a logical and systematic way for both
teachers and learners to follow the course. Learners are able to compare
their performance before and after the time along with the course,
which encourages self-evaluation, independence and collaboration

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(Baki, 1994). In other words, students can get access to the data or
document of their performance on the internet platform to see their
results and gain feedback from teachers for further improvement. This
also helps reducing unnecessary time for giving comments in classroom.
Learners actively follow the instruction and solutions that teachers
propose for academic learning purposes. Moreover, the portfolio brings
about a more personalized learning method that is suitable for each
learner because they are given feedback and advice individually. Melek
(2015) claimed that teachers are able to make use of the portfolio to
identify and determine the strengths and weaknesses of the curriculum
to modify and adjust to adapt to modern learning environment. It also
allows learners to express their viewpoints, to be in charge of their
learning processes and to witness their performance of whether they
have achieved the goal of the course or not via the collection of
evidences.
The role of autonomy in productive learning
Learners are frequently expected to master four skills to balance their
language proficiency in academic sector; however, it is not an ease.
Productive skills, especially writing, require learners to get long-term
exposure to its genres with a variety of grammatical structures ranging
from subjunctives to inversion. Thus, learning writing is a time-taking
process in demand for investment of energy, effort and time. Nunan
(2000) stated that learners have to gain insights in several linguistic
issues such as lexical resource, grammatical structures and the way they
express their ideas in a logical way. Coherent expressions are beneficial
to bring smooth connotation to readers and comprehensive versions of
writing will be produced. In EFL, writing a well-organized paragraph is
even not an easy task as it includes the flexibility in idea arrangement,
the understanding of content, the naturalness in the target language, and
metacognitive strategies.
Aygun, et al. (2016) claimed that writing consists of a volume of
challenges from brainstorming, outlining, and during the writing
process. Nonetheless, the limit of time in classroom does not allow
teachers to keep track with individual performance or personal
weaknesses. As a result, learning autonomy is highly compulsory to
improve writing skill in current academic world. Learners are
recommended to actively opt for their topics of interest and invest time
and effort in practicing exercises and gaining empirical experience in
their life. Dickinson (1994) considered autonomy as active
responsibility in learning process and decide the success of learning and
teaching activities.

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Moreover, Holec (1981) argued that autonomous learners are not only
those who learn the language but also the ones who try to learn the
strategies to language acquisition. Therefore, classroom lessons only
provide learners with basic linguistic components with no regard to
practical or life-long experience. Learners dominate the success of
acquisition via their independence and activeness in gaining knowledge.
Writing is not an exception. The main reason is writing represents who
the writers are and their intellectual competence in critical analysis.
In addition, Sabitha (2013) defined language learning autonomy with
three key aspects of learner involvement, learner reflection and
appropriate use of language. First, autonomous writing learning is
shown through how much learners participate in learning process
inside and outside the classroom. It is evaluated on a continuous basis
during the course and after school time via other means of assessment.
Formative assessment can be conducted in classroom activities,
personal participation, group discussion, and presentation. Second, it is
the way learners build their plan, set their goals and develop their ideas
during writing process. The outline of the paper content and its
procedures in analysis contribute to optimize the quality of an academic
paper. Third, the naturalness and suitability of language use is
important as well to indicate their proficiency in the target language. In
particular, the appropriateness of language use is based on the extent of
similarity in expressions between two languages. Intercultural
communication competence plays a role in ensuring the
understandability and acceptability of one paper in the target cultures
(Nguyen Thi Hong Thu & Nguyen Minh Tri, 2019)
Why integrate E-portfolio in academic writing?
Writing as a productive skill is regularly assessed with subjective and
qualitative criteria but a single final test cannot fully indicate the
competency of language learners during the process. Therefore, E-
portfolio is the most suitable instrument of assessment in the case. Blair
and Takayoshi (1997) declared that the popularity of portfolios is
justifiable due to the availability of formative observation and analysis. E-
portfolio is engaged with the evolution of digital era, especially in the
Industrial Revolution 4.0 with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI).
In comparison with traditional methods of learning data storage, E-
portfolio is much more convenient. It is uploaded and available on the
internet, which allows both teachers and learners to use and share with
each other in an easy way. According to Madden (2007) the platform for
interactions is deemed a forum for teacher-learner and peer discussion

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on academic topics and writing issue. Moreover, it eradicates
unnecessary tasks for teachers such as writing notes, collecting papers
manually and the time and effort from students are cut down
irrespective of proximity and tine zone. This is also helpful for distance
learning in the era of globalization. Most importantly, learners are able
to make use of creative and lively visual aids such as pictures, animation,
videos, and graphics. That can stimulate learners’ engagement in
academic writing. It is worth pointing out that in academic writing
process, learners are the key control of success, so using E-portfolio
helps learners search for information, data, and statistics, which actively
stimulates their academic development.
Several scientific studies have been conducted to investigate the
effectiveness of portfolios in academic learning and most of which have
shown positive results. Bacabac (2012) found the improvement of his
learners in logical writing and competitiveness after applying the use of
E-portfolio aiming to explore the functions in literacy.
METHODOLOGY
Setting and participants
The study was conducted in a writing class of 20 fifteen-year-old
students at VUS English Center of Ba Hom branch. The participants were
chosen as convenience sampling and they were coded from A1 to A20 to
reduce the subjectivity of the researchers in analyzing the data. The
frequency of classroom participation was two days a week, and a day
had three hours of studying. Learners’ English proficiency ranged from
A2 to B1 in Common European Framework for Reference. The course
outcomes were to help learners understand the format and the
strategies to write a short paragraph of 80-100 words about common
topics in academic styles. In addition, the survey lasted for eight weeks.
Every week, students were instructed and required to submit their
paper onto an online platform for receiving teacher feedback and peer
comments. The forum was accessible for all class members to upload
and download materials and marked papers. Then, the results and
specification of strengths and limitations in learners’ papers were
recorded. This helped learners to realize their weaknesses and
improvements over the time during the course.
Instruments
The data were collected through qualitative and quantitative
approaches including observation, test (pre-test and post-test) writing
performance, and mainly E-portfolio, and interview.

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E-portfolio: All course information and materials were uploaded onto
Google classroom. Students would check up their performance in this
forum. In addition, this also stored their results along with the course
Test: a pre-test was delivered to learners to assess their levels at the
beginning of the course. After the course, a post-test was taken to
determine learners’ achievement. The adoption of the standardized test
tasks of course resources was applied to ensure the validity and
reliability of the test. The marking criteria were based on four key
academic factors of task achievement, lexical resource, grammatical
range and accuracy, and coherence and cohesion.
Observation: learners were assigned to prepare for the lesson following
the course outline provided in the portfolio. They were expected to
brainstorm, write an outline, and search for further information of the
topic. Teacher assessed their preparation based on engagement, idea
contribution and participation in classroom
Interview: Open questions were given to investigate learners’ attitudes
to the new approach and their weaknesses during their study
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
Interactions over the period
Figure 1
The frequency of online interactions

250
200
Frequency

150
100
50
0
Week Week Week Week Week Week Week Week
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

The line graph illustrates the frequency students interacted with their
peers on the online platform during the course. It can be seen that the
frequency experienced the considerable increase over the
implementation of E-portfolio. In the first week, there were only 43
interactions recorded but in the next week the number doubled the

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previous one at 86 times. Then, the figure went up slightly to 103 times
in the third week. Subsequently, the trend was significantly upward to
214 times in the seventh week and then surged steadily to 220 at the
end of the study. This means that when learners began the course, the
level of interactions among learners was considerably low as they did
not have chances and motivation to communicate with others outside
the class. At the beginning of the course, learners were a little confused
with the way to use E-portfolio, so they could not fully interact or get
access to the platform as expected. However, the data showed positive
change with the increase interactions after the very first trial in
uploading, giving comments, receiving feedback on the classroom
platform. As a result, the number of interactions increased over the time
when learners got used to this new method. In other words, the degree
of learner autonomy soared dramatically, which is represented by the
fact that they invested more time into reading the papers of their peers
to give feedback and they were willing to participate in discussion for
further analysis and negotiation about the correctness and
improvements of the papers. In comparison with 20 students, under 200
interactions were not really high. The case was caused by the
distractions learners had to handle for public school time and the
burden of school homework. Therefore, they could not totally
concentrate on learning in this mode despite the considerable rise in
interactions.
The comparison of learners’ performance before and after the
study
Table 1
The comparison of pre-test and post-test results
Paired Samples Statistics
Statistic Bootstrapa
Bias Std. BCa 95% Confidence
Error Interval
Lower Upper
Mean 5.28 .00 .00 . .
N 20
Pair 1 Pretest
Std. Deviation .939 .000 .000 . .
Std. Error Mean .210

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 Mean 6.08 .00 .00 . .
N 20
Posttest
Std. Deviation .977 .000 .000 . .
Std. Error Mean .218

Paired Samples Test

Paired Differences t df Sig. (2-

tailed)
Mean Std. Std. Error95% Confidence
Deviation Mean Interval of the
Difference

Lower Upper

-
Pair Pretest -
-.800 .251 .056 -.918 -.682 14.23 19 .000
1 Posttest
6

The chart represents the comparison of the scores learners achieved

before and after the implementation of E-portfolio. It is obvious that the
post-test’s mean at 6.08 was higher than that of pre-test at 5.28, which
indicates the improvement of learners during the course. Furthermore,
sig. 000 was lower than 5% to show the significant disparity in statistics.
The improvement of learners’ academic performance was noticeable over
the period of time. The average score of the whole class increased by
approximately one, which was considerable in eight weeks. The lack of
the adequacy of time posed a number of difficulties for both teacher and
learners to fully adapt and master the procedures to use E-portfolio. This
means the application of e-portfolio was beneficial to enhance learners’
competence in their writing skill. This is undeniable that the degree of
discussions among learners contributed to the development of their
writing performance.

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Learners’ attitudes towards the effectiveness of E-portfolio
Figure 2
Learners' attitudes towards the effectiveness of E-portfolio

Disagree Strongly
0% disagree
0%
Neutral Strongly
25% agree
35%

Agree
40%

The pie chart shows information on learners’ belief to the effectiveness

of applying E-portfolio in language learning. The majority of learners’
expressed their agreement on the role of E-portfolio including 35% of
strongly agree and 25% of agree. In addition, 40% of students chose
neutral attitudes toward the question. In other words, the majority of
learners considered E-portfolio as a useful instrument in their study
with the flexibility of time and locations to get access and prepare for
the lessons. It allowed them to read the papers of their classmates to
learn from mistakes and review their papers for better academic
writing. They did not have to struggle with the illegibility of their hand
writing and carry a huge number of materials all the time.
The critical analysis of the interview and observation
In comparison with traditional teaching approaches, the application of
E-portfolio encouraged learners to prepare for the lessons in a more
careful way. In normal classrooms, learners do the preparation by
themselves, but this method allowed them to discuss with their peers to
figure out the issue and understand the topic in a more profound
manner. Before classroom, learners could know the topic in the course
outline and search for the information that they were interested in and
brought them into classroom for discussion. As a result, they could
analyze and comprehend the topics twice, which could strengthen their
acquisition
In addition, learners expressed their excitement when they were
allowed to read other peers’ papers to collect ideas and check their

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mistakes to avoid in the future. This was the ultimate convenience of E-
portfolio instead of borrowing papers manually. Their papers were also
commented with supportive and constructive feedback from both
teacher and classmates. On the other hand, in classroom, they could
easily understand the topic and confidently express their ideas which
were meticulously prepared at home. It was shown in their active
participation in classroom brainstorming or discussion.
Most importantly, learners could study at their pace. Every individual
had their personal milestones, competency, and learning styles. E-
portfolio helped them to keep track with their style which created the
comfort and flexibility in language learning of linguistic components in
academic writing. Therefore, it played an important role in maintaining
learners’ motivation even in difficult situations.
IMPLICATION AND CONCLUSION
The findings of the study have shown promising implications to apply E-
portfolio widely in every classroom. First, this is a flexible and
constructive platform for learners and teacher to discuss, prepare, and
interact with each other in the absence of limitations of geographical
locations or time. Learner autonomy is subsequently enhanced in a
purposeful manner. Second, this method allows learners to be
independent thinkers in academic writing. They are the key to control
and decide the success of writing lessons via their autonomy.
Third, the data collection about learners’ performance, achievement,
and progress helped teachers to realize the weaknesses of learners to
re-consider or justify the program to suit learners’ demand and learning
style. It also gives learners an opportunity to actively follow their
performance throughout the course. Hence, they could minimize their
limitations and optimize their strength.
In conclusion, the implementation of e-portfolio as a learning tool has
shown its significant role in empowering learners’ writing skill at VUS
center. It is clear from the result that e-portfolio is applicable as the
source of motivation to enhance learner autonomy to communicate and
interact with other peers outside the class. Also, it acts as the evidence
for learners’ self-assessment, peer assessment, and teacher’s
supervision during the course to provide appropriate instructions for
learners’ improvement. Hence, the average score of the class has
noticeably increased. It is still recommended that further research
should be conducted to investigate the intervention of personality in
learning autonomy to maximize the effectiveness of writing classroom.

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THE AUTHORS
Mr. Nhan Trong Nguyen is currently an English lecturer at VUS English
Center. He is also a MA candidate at Ho Chi Minh University of
Technology (HUTECH). His research interests cover academic writing,
teaching young learners, and language assessment.
Mr. Tri Minh Nguyen is currently a lecturer at Faculty of Foreign
Languages, Nguyen Tat Thanh University. He is also an Academic
Director at The V Language. His research interest covers discourse
analysis, translation and interpretation, and methodology. Scopus ID:
57209321287 Email: [email protected]

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