Electronic portfolios, or e-portfolios, refer to multimedia environments wherein students can showcase their artefacts and reflections, which represent their growth and competencies (MacDonald, Liu, Lowell, Tsai & Lohr, 2004). Compared with their paperbased counterparts, e-portfolios enable students to collect, store and manage their artefacts in a relatively easy and efficient manner, so long as Internet access is available (Heath, 2002). Further, they also allow the artefacts to take such forms as images, sound files, video clips and so on (Knight, Hakel & Gromko, 2006). Additionally, dispensed with time and location constraints, e-portfolios simplify the feedback-giving process for teachers and peers in a radical way. Moreover, their characteristic trait of being widely accessible to the public can also help students foster a heightened sense of audience and, as a result, take more careful account of what they write and how they write (Wall & Peltier, 1996). In the literature, although a number of empirical efforts have examined the implementation of e-portfolios in both first and second language classroom settings, most of them centred attention on general learning achievement (eg, Chang, Wu & Ku, 2005) and writing performance (eg, Hung, 2006). Thus far, few attempts have investigated the relationship between e-portfolios and oral speaking skills. In response, this study set out to explore English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students’ perceptions towards the use of e-portfolios as a tool to document and assess their speaking performance. In so doing, this study intended to bridge the gap in the emerging literature on e-portfolio instruction and assessment, and bring to light an alternative tool for EFL teachers to come to more informed evaluation of students’ oral skills.
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