Языковой портфель филолога Language Portfolio. Практикум

PART 2

Ex. 3. Answer the following questions.

1.Are you planning to compose a process or a presentation portfolio?

2.A paper portfolio or an electronic portfolio?

3.Whatever the type or form, you must consider three important principles: choice, variety, and reflection.

Ex. 4. Organize mini discussions on the following:

Portfolio keepers need to choose what to include and how to arrange and present each artifact. It’s very likely that an instructor or program leader will assign some elements or provide guidelines, so a first step is to make sure you know what choices are yours to make. Will you be making big decisions like the type of portfolio you’ll keep or the technologies you’ll use? Or will your decisions be on a smaller scale, like length or number of entries? Perhaps you will get to choose which artifacts or pieces of evidence to include – and how to arrange those entries. In any case, you will make many choices, selections, and decisions at every stage of the composing process. The reflective learning inherent in the portfolio method will make you more aware of your decision-making process. Most importantly, you will need to choose your artifacts carefully and wisely depending on the rhetorical situation. The guide you are reading now will help you make these important choices.

Portfolio keepers have different strengths and interests, and their portfolios should reflect and celebrate these differences. No two portfolios will ever be exactly alike, even those created for the same course or instructor. A writing portfolio invites you to show off your writing ability and the ways you approached different topics or audiences. If you can make a number of choices, you might stress varietyinyourportfoliobyincludingsamplesofinformalwriting(Tweets or Facebook status updates, e-mails or notes to collaborators), as well as samples of projects you’ve spent a great deal of time revising, editing, and polishing. You might demonstrate, for example, how different amounts of time spent on each entry impact the diversity of your work. Variety is one of the reasons that portfolios are considered amorevalidmeasureofwritingability,especiallywhencomparedwith one-time assessments that focus on measuring things like grammar, style and usage, punctuation, and mechanics. When people review your portfolio, they see numerous examples of your work, pieces

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created at different times and for different audiences. Portfolios are an opportunity to show that you can produce more than essays for a teacher – that you are flexible as a writer and know how to adjust to different situations and speak to different audiences. They also give readers insight into the specific issues, subjects, and problems that interest you and that you have chosen to spend time researching and working on in your academic or professional career.

Ex. 5. Review the following.

Keeping a portfolio helps you look at your work differently, as a whole rather than as a series of separate assignments or projects. The choices you make in building your portfolio and in displaying variety will demand that you practice reflective learning and selfassessment. With this booklet to guide you, you will take a careful look at your work to identify your patterns, strengths, and preferences for negotiating writing tasks, for learning new skills, and for putting those skills into practice. You must go beyond simply stringing the pieces of your portfolio together: you need to be able to articulate why you made certain choices and what you meant to convey through those choices. Educational theorists use the word metacognition to describepeople’sabilitytothinkabouttheirownthinking.Metameans «after,» «behind,» or «beyond»; cognition means «the act or process of knowing». Metacognition, then, is the ability to «know beyond one’s knowing,» or to think about your own thinking. Reflection is so integrated into the process of portfolio keeping that it is sometimes difficulttoseparatechoiceandvarietyfromreflection;manyeducators believe that reflection is the heart and soul of portfolio keeping.

Ex. 6. Use the following «acts» in your reflections:

WatchingPlanning RememberingRereading ReviewingChecking AskingEditing ExplainingRevising ClarifyingQuestioning WonderingPredicting ImaginingForecasting EvaluatingMemorizing RehearsingSharing

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GeneratingDelivering

InitiatingSummarizing

PretendingAnalyzing

PreparingSynthesizing

PresentingDefining

ArrangingMapping

SearchingExploring

Ex. 7. Answer the following questions:

What has your instructor, team leader, or supervisor asked you to create?

Are you working on a process or a presentation portfolio?

Are you expected to submit your portfolio as a paper document or electronically?

What choices do you need to make about tools or variety or time frame?

Now that you have a better understanding of how portfolios can differ and how they often are used among writers, you’re ready to begin portfolio keeping.

Ex. 8. Write one or two paragraphs about any questions you have about the portfolio you’ll be expected to produce.

Ifyoualreadyknowsomethingaboutportfolios-youhaveprepared one before or have heard about them -you might address how what you’ve read so far fits -or doesn’t- with your earlier experience or with your assumptions. If they are new to you, what interests you about portfolios? From what you know so far, what parts of the portfolio process do you expect to do well on or succeed with? What parts of your reading and writing history make you confident about creating either a process or a presentation portfolio? What makes you hesitant? Once you are finished with this brief, informal piece, give it a title and/or file name and store it where you can find it again; it may come in handy later.

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LANGUAGE PORTFOLIO: practical training

UNIT 6

Setting Goals and Planning Electronic Portfolio

The main aim is to learn the characteristics and types of portfolios, the elements that provide the foundation of every portfolio, to improve the skills of collecting, selecting, and presenting your work, to learn how to present your knowledge and skills to others, which will help to practice communication skills by thinking about the larger rhetorical context for the portfolio, including its purpose, its audience, its focus, and its credibility.

Knowledgeandskills,acquiredbystudentsasaresultofstudying. A student should:

–think consciously or deliberately about how you learn best or what is most meaningful to you about what you’ve learned;

–focus on your own patterns, habits, and preferences as a learner;

–identify what doesn’t work well for you, repeat what does, and develop strategies for addressing difficult tasks or overcoming obstacles.

Mastering the aspects mentioned above will contribute to the formation of the following competences:

–the ability to structure and integrate knowledge from different professional spheres and be ready to use and develop the knowledge in the course of accomplishing professional tasks (GPC-13);

–the ability to study native language speech behavior, describe new language processes in social, political and cultural life of the foreign society (GPC-16);

–the ability to analyze phenomena and processes necessary to demonstrate and confirm theoretical results of the research (GPC-17);

–to own the methods of cognitive and formal natural language modelling and methods of creating metalanguages (PC-18).

Ex. 1. Mastering the aspects mentioned above will contribute to the formation of the following competences:

– the ability to structure and integrate knowledge from different professional spheres and be ready to use and develop the knowledge in the course of accomplishing professional tasks (GPC-13);

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–the ability to study native language speech behavior, describe new language processes in social, political and cultural life of the foreign society (GPC-16);

–the ability to analyze phenomena and processes necessary to demonstrate and confirm theoretical results of the research (GPC-17);

–to own the methods of cognitive and formal natural language modelling and methods of creating metalanguages (PC-18).

Ex. 2. Review the following.

Depending on how much time you have to plan your portfolio – several weeks, a semester, or a year – some of the early – stage questions to consider include: Who is the audience for your portfolio, and what are the elements of the rhetorical situation? Will your portfolio focus on process or presentation? Should your portfolio be a paper document or an elect one? Which tools will you have access to? Will the portfolio be checked or assessed before the final evaluation? Will you choose all of the artifacts, and if not, which ones are required or expected?

Make sure that you answer these questions as early in your portfolio process as possible, and try to spend some time imagining what your portfolio might look like. Portfolio designers often sketch out the structure of their work on paper, much like a writer might use clustering or mapping.That’s a great approach.The sooner you begin to imagine your portfolio’s purpose and appearance, making it your own, the sooner you can begin to get the done.

Ex. 3. Think about the following questions and discuss them in a class.

What are some of the possibilities for arranging and presenting artifacts? Consider the tools that you have access to, the software and hardware you already know how to use or would like to learn to use, and the experiences you’ve had with writing texts or creating documents. Do you know how to change fonts, margins, tabs, spacing? How to add and reference copyrighted images from the Internet? How to create graphs? How to insert footnotes? How to add sound or video clips to an electronic file? You do not have to use state-of-the-art technologies to create a state-of-the-art portfolio, of course, but thoughtful design, which requires reflective thinking, will enhance the content.

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LANGUAGE PORTFOLIO: practical training

As you start to imagine your portfolio, think about the people you know who will be reading it and others who might have the opportunitytoviewit,andwhattheymightneedinordertounderstand, appreciate, and navigate through your work. The ability to anticipate readers’ needs and expectations is at the heart of good writing. You might pretend you are taking your readers with you on a trip, but they don’t know the wayonly you do. Show them how to navigate through their journey. Or think of your portfolio as a movie in production, with you as the director, setting up each scene and making connections between things. Writing and directing have much in common. In this planning stage, remember the three principles of portfolio keeping: choice, variety, and reflection.

Ex. 4. Some of the questions below will help you think about how you want to achieve choice, variety, and reflection in your portfolio, and how you might want to present yourself. Write down the answers to these questions, and save them or be ready to discuss your responses with other students or colleagues.

1.Do you want to show progresshow much your work and thinking have improved? How might you do that?

2.Do you want to show persistence -your ability to stick with a project over a period of time? How?

3.Do you want to show your abilities as a designer of Web-based materials? Why?

4.Do you want to show flexibilitythe ability to write in different styles or voices? What can you do to demonstrate this?

5.Do you want to show creativityhow you have made an instructor’s assignments your own? How could this be accomplished?

6.Do you want to show independencerevising well beyond your peers’ or your supervisor’s suggestions?

Your answers to these questions may change later, but having goals to help shape your portfolio is a good idea. If you are in a class, your instructor may help you address these questions once the class settles into a routine and as soon as at least one writing project has been taken through each stage of the writing process. Some instructors use contracts to help students set and meet certain goals; these contracts are tailored to students’ strengths, but they also address weaknesses head-on. In the following list, check off what you would like to accomplish in the course. What is important to you?

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I hope to keep up with my portfolio project, to stay on top of thing and not fall behind.

I want to become more comfortable with sharing my work with others.

I want to learn more about writing and design in a digital age. I’d like to better organize my thoughts.

I’d like to be able to take constructive criticism without feeling defensive.

I want to find out if my writing skills are strong enough to choose a career that involves writing.

I want to create persuasive arguments that convince people without offending them.

I’d like to be able to review a draft once and know what to do to make it better.

I want to try to write every day.

I want to figure out why some of my projects go so smoothly and sot so difficult.

I want to be proud of my portfolio and do the best work I can.

Ex. 5. Organize mini discussions on the following:

Your instructor or program may require that you create an e-portfolio, rather than a paper-based portfolio. Regardless of its form, a portfolio is a composition created by combining multiple artifacts using reflective and descriptive writing that connects all of those artifacts together into a coherent whole. An e-portfolio adds another dimension into the mix: multimodality, which is the use of multiple modes of expression (e.g., text, images, audio, video, links, graphic elements, etc.) to communicate and express ideas. An e-portfolio requires you to consider how to design a navigable and logical organizational structure, create links between different artifacts (and even to outside sources), and use visual elements to create a desired effect. Consequently, it makes sense to think of an e-portfolio holistically as a composition that requires as careful a process of developing and drafting as any research paper or fulllength video project. Although it may take more time to develop an e-portfolio than a paper-based portfolio, the pay offs make the extra time worthwhile: electronic portfolios can be updated, maintained, and distributed more easily; and they offer more flexibility for making connections among your artifacts.

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LANGUAGE PORTFOLIO: practical training

Ex. 6. Discuss with your peers the following:

Hyperlinks make navigating e-portfolios easier than paper portfolios and these links allow the writer to make connections beyond the materials in the portfolio to anything available on the World Wide Web.Although a paper portfolio can include photographs and other visual elements, the e-portfolio allows for the use of a variety of media types, including audio and video. Consider, too, the accessibility and portability of the e-portfolio. You can create, store and present it online: and you can easily access it whenever and wherever you want to work on it. Even if you choose to prepare and store your work on an external storage drive, when your portfolio is for evaluation or presentation, all you have to do is upload it to the Internet. You may be required to use a particular program to create your e-portfolio, perhaps one used by your academic institution as a whole c particular program within your school. There are many tools, though, that can be used to create an e-portfolio, from programs that help you create a custom Web site, to blogging applications, to cloudbased file creation and storage programs like Dropbox or Google Drive, to specialized e-portfolio platforms like the Bedford e-Portfolio. If your instructor has asked for an electronic portfolio, you need to know if it needs to be prepared and submitted online, or if it can be submitted offline on a media storage tool.

With any of these platforms, you must consider what options the program allows and how much choice you will have with regard to the overall design of the portfolio in order to work effectively and make smart decisions within the constraints of the program. Think carefully about the computers and other digital devices your audience will use when reading and viewing your portfolio. If readers do not have highspeedInternetaccess,forinstance,youshouldconsiderincorporating fewer or smaller graphics, files, or videos. Similarly, screens come in different sizes. How will your portfolio look on a tablet screen as opposed to a large monitor? Will the front types you have chosen display on most computers? These are some variables you must consider when planning the design of your e-portfolio.

Ex. 7. Review information about presentation tools.

There are many presentation tools that can be used to create e-port: and each has its benefits and limitations. The type of presentation tool you use plays a significant role in the type of navigational structure you can develop.

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PART 2

Ex. 8. Fill in Table 1 carefully and weigh the advantages and disadvantages each type of tools.

Table 1

Presentation Tools for e-Portfolios: Benefits and Limitations

Ex. 9. Discuss E-portfolio navigation and design with your peers.

Oncetheformoftheportfolioischosen–byyouoryourprogram– your next step is to think about how your readers will navigate through the document. This requires considering how to organize the portfolio pieces into categories or sections and create an indexing or labeling system that will help readers access your work in a way that takes advantage of the unique properties of digital media. If you would like your readers to view sections or items in a particular order, you will have to structure the links to make that happen. If you would like readers to be able to move around the portfolio in any order they choose, you should make sure that you provide context and explanation throughout the portfolio that will help them understand your work and ideas. For example, you could use hyperlinks on your e portfolio home page to connect readers to other pages on the site, or you could create menu items that readers can click to go to a particular category of work such as your research projects or your reflective writing. You might decide to use reflective writing to introduce different sections of the work on different pages of the e-portfolio if you are creating a multipage Web site. The home page of the e-portfolio might be the place for you to provide a brief overview of yourself and your work. Ultimately, you should think about your portfolio as a «network,» much like the Web itself. Through links between items in the portfolio and ideas and techniques within the items themselves, you create a unity that makes the portfolio appear seam less though it is richly layered.

As you develop your portfolio, you will need to think about your work and working process as a way to connect the ideas and artifacts intheportfolio.Thiskindofreflectivethinkingisespeciallyusefulwhen you are working on an electronic portfolio because it can provide

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the unifying themes and metaphors that influence everything from navigation and linking schemes to visual design to the development of an effective authorial voice and persona. An electronic portfolio can function like a company’s Web site in its ability to showcase who you are and what you have to offer, and the overall design and appearance of the site conveys information on a variety of levels. For example, the visual look of a site can instill confidence in an audience by appearing sophisticated and stylish, rather than garish or cartoony. A video message from the founder of the company can put a face on an otherwise abstract entity that helps visitors to the site feel a sense of trust. A well-designed, seamless system of links and categories provides a smooth user experience and prevents the frustration that arises if users get lost or stuck in the web of a site. Designing and creating an e-portfolio means not only that you can gather your work together into one space, but also that you can create a new, coherent, and convincing text out of those pieces, one that demonstrates how the skills you are highlighting in individual artifacts -such as the ability to organize information effectively or make connections between ideas or use visual design principles – have given you the tools to create a complex, multilayered composition like an e-portfolio.

Withane-portfolio,thinkabouthowtopresentyourselfthroughthe usabilityofyourdesign;thatis,thefunctionalityofyourportfoliodesign provides insight into who you are and how you think.The connections you make between your artifacts and your design choices are key in successfully guiding your readers through the portfolio in a way that makes the portfolio meaningful. If the e-portfolio is to be more than just a collection of diverse pieces of work, identifying your purpose and goals for the portfolio is essential. Although they can be used for print portfolios as well, metaphors are especially meaningful in e-portfolios because of the graphical user interface. Instead of using words as links to different sections, you can use images or icons. In an effective design scheme, the images, fonts, colors, and graphic elements all relate and work together. In other words, you should think of an overarching metaphor or theme that symbolizes the work and what you want the portfolio to demonstrate, and then develop a visual design theme that connects with that metaphor.

The reflective components of the e-portfolio help guide and direct the reader, so you must think carefully about where to place the reflective elements in the portfolio. Readers of e-portfolios need some

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