Impact of ePortfolio Assessment as an Instructional Strategy on Students’ Academic Speaking Skills: An Experimental Study

Abstract

This paper reports an experimental study on the impact of ePortfolio assessment (EPA) as an instructional strategy on undergraduate students’ academic speaking skills and the difference in impact, if any, on their performance in four different communicative contexts. Set in India and conducted with first-year EAP students from various academic disciplines of science, commerce, and arts, the study was built on the gap concerning the scarcity of empirical studies on ePortfolio use in academic speaking contexts. While only a few studies have investigated the employment of EPA for teaching speaking skills, the study makes a significant contribution by carrying out and reporting an experiment with adequate details which, in turn, make the study replicable. The study adopted an experimental design with the experimental group (EG, n = 39) undergoing an ePortfolio- driven intervention of 30 hours. The results, obtained through the employment of t-tests, indicated a statistically significant impact on the performance scores of EG students and a considerable gap between the scores of students in EG and the comparison group (CG, n = 36). A repeated measure of variance (RM ANOVA) run on gain scores for four task types revealed that students’ performance in the short response type and reading prompt- based response task was better than those in extended response type and pair discussion tasks. The findings may further the academic use of EPA in English a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) speaking classrooms. Future researchers can qualitatively investigate the effects of EPA and how learners’ attitude toward EPA shape their performance.