Fostering EFL learners’ autonomy in light of portfolio assessment: Exploring the potential impact of gender

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of portfolio assessment as a process-orientedmechanism on the autonomy of Iranian advanced EFL learners. A particular concern was to examinethe potential effect of gender on portfolio assessment by taking the learners’ writing ability intoaccount. The participants were 80 male and female advanced EFL learners to whom the LearnerAutonomy Questionnaire (Kashefian, 2002) was administered to check their homogeneity prior to thestudy in terms of autonomy; a truncated form of a TOEFL test was also given to the participants toassess their language proficiency. The participants were then randomly divided into 4 groups: 2experimental groups (20 females in class A and 20 males in class B) and 2 control groups (20 femalesin class C and 20 males in class D). The portfolio assessment was integrated into the experimentalgroups to explore whether and to what extent their autonomy might enhance and also to investigatethe possible effect of gender on portfolio assessment in writing ability. The portfolio assessment wasbased on the classroom portfolio model adopted from Hamp-Lyons and Condon (2000), consisting of 3procedures: collection, selection, and reflection. In contrast, the control groups received thetraditional assessment of writing. The data were analyzed using 2 independent samples t tests, mean,and the effect size. The results showed that the portfolio procedures considerably improved theautonomy of the participants. Also, gender had no impact on portfolio assessment.

Keywords:

alternative assessment , portfolio assessment , autonomy