Portfolios are collections of students' works over time. They often document students' best works and may include other types of process information such as drafts of the students' work, the students' self-assessment of the work, and the parents' assessment. Portfolios may be used for evaluation of students' abilities and progress. The study involved the analysis of 156 reflective essays written by college students taking a basic course in English. The reflective essays were part of a portfolio project, which is one of the requirements of the course. The data showed that through this alternative self-evaluation scheme, students were able to identify the various linguistic problems involving all the macro-skills. Moreover, through this assessment students were able to address these deficiencies through the learned independence and selfautonomy in learning that they have developed.
Researchers have suggested that there is a noun bias in children's early vocabularies brought about by features of adults' child-directed utterances, which may vary across languages (E. V. Bates et al., 1994; D. Gentner, 1982). In the present study, the authors explored noun bias in 60 Filipino-English bilingual children whose 2 languages differed in how they emphasized nouns and verbs in typical syntactic forms. The results revealed a noun bias, but only in the bilingual children's English vocabulary. The noun bias in English was associated with the frequency of nouns in the caregivers' utterances and the proportion of nouns in the initial positions of the caregivers' utterances. The authors also found different associations between salient positions in the adult utterances and children's vocabularies in English and Filipino.
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