AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY TO INVESTIGATE THE USE OF A LANGUAGE PORTFOLIO IN DEVELOPING STUDENTS’ AUTONOMOUS LEARNING AND REFLECTIVE THINKING SKILLS

Abstract

Present day educational systems around the world strongly focus on developing students’, graduates and professionals’ autonomous learning skills, reflective thinking skills and self-assessment skills. In many studies related to the above-mentioned skills development, portfolio pedagogy is a central subject of discussion. The aim of the study was to experimentally test the potential of the Uzbek Model of European language portfolio in promoting pre-service English teacher training program for students’ autonomous learning, and reflective thinking skills. The experimental study on portfolio implementation was carried out among first-year students of three local universities in Uzbekistan. 651 students from three sample institutions took part in the pre-test stage of the experiment. Research participants were then divided into control and experimental groups. The total number of students in experimental groups and control groups accounted for 148 and 150 students respectively. Students in experimental groups actively used language portfolio developed by the author throughout the academic year. Pre-test and post-test were conducted employing reflective thinking skills survey adapted from David Kember’s work. Mean values of survey results were then statistically tested using independent-samples t-test and one-sample t-tests in IBM SPSS version 17.0. According to the findings of the research, the language portfolio has a considerable impact on developing students’ skills of autonomous learning, and reflective thinking given the language portfolio is an integral part of a course curriculum and aligned to module learning objectives, tasks, activities employed within the modules.