ePortfolio Assignment

English 110 (English Composition) Portfolio Components & Framing Prompt

 

All students in English 110 maintain a portfolio (or ePortfolio) and submit it at the end of the term. In these final weeks of the semester, you will make some choices about which work to submit as part of your final portfolio (see below) and frame your evidence of learning in a framing letter.

 

Your final portfolio for ENG 110 will include the following work samples:

  • First and Final Draft of One Significant (Showcase) Writing Project
  • Marked First Draft of One Peer’s Paper to show peer-review evidence
  • Copy of Annotated Pages from at least One Course Reading – 3-5 annotated pages is sufficient
  • Informal Reading Response Evidence Associated with Chosen Annotated Reading(s) – homework responses, journal assignments, reading questions, note-taking evidence, etc.
  • Completed Recursive Writing Sheet

 

In addition, your portfolio will contain a six-part framing statement (or 6 separate statements) that responds to the following instructions and prompt:

  1. Revisit your early work and review your approach to revising early in the term and compare changes between your first and final draft of your chosen Significant Writing Project as you prepare to write a section of your statement titled Learning Outcome 1. In that section, explain how you have made specific changes that demonstrate your ability to engage in both global and local revision (about 200-450 words). What does this show you about your development? You will likely draw from the ways your class has discussed revision.
  2. Review your final draft of the chosen Significant Writing Project as you prepare to write a section of your statement titled Learning Outcome 2. In that section, explain the ways you used sources as evidence in the paper, including at least one specific example that demonstrates your ability to select, integrate, and explain quotations (about 200-450 words). You will likely draw from the ways your class has discussed the practice of integrating your ideas with others. Revisit your early efforts at integrating your ideas with evidence to help you think (and write) about your development.
  3. Read the brief selection from Susan Gilroy and the learning outcomes for English 110 found on the reverse of this page. Treat Gilroy’s selection, Learning Outcome 3, and both the chosen Course Reading Annotation Pages and Informal Reading Response Evidence as your sources. Write about your own approach to active, critical reading (about 250-450 words). Explain your reading practices in the chosen evidence, making sure to engage Gilroy’s ideas and the third learning outcome. What are your annotating and informal responding approaches? How did you decide what to mark or discuss? What might this tell you about your ability to “interrogate” readings, as Gilroy puts it in her title. You will likely also draw from the ways your class has discussed and practiced active, critical reading. Title this section of your statement Learning Outcome 3.
  4. Create a fourth section of your statement titled Learning Outcome 4. Review your feedback on the chosen Marked First Draft of One Peer’s Paper, in addition to any guidance offered by your instructor. Revisit your early efforts at peer review to help you think (and write) about your development. Write about your peer review practice, making sure to explain how specific examples of your comments show your achievement of this learning outcome and any ongoing areas for growth (about 150-450 words).
  5. In a section titled Learning Outcomes 5 and 6, comment on what the chosen Significant Writing Project shows about your ability to cite sources using MLA guidelines and to make local revisions to address your typical errors. You will likely draw from the ways your class has discussed sentence error and MLA. Be sure to include specific examples (about 150-450 words).
  6. In a section titled Recursive Writing Sheet. This page should include a picture of your Recursive Writing Sheet and a 150-200 word framing statement discussing your favorite writing and reading strategies and how you plan to use these strategies outside of English Composition. You can refer to future reading and writing projects, but you might also consider expanding your reflection to other projects or processes.

 

 

Learning Outcomes for English 110

 

At the conclusion of English 110, students should:

  1. Demonstrate the ability to approach writing as a recursive process that requires substantial revision of drafts for content, organization, and clarity (global revision), as well as editing and proofreading (local revision).
  2. Be able to integrate their ideas with those of others using summary, paraphrase, quotation, analysis, and synthesis of relevant sources.
  3. Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.
  4. Be able to critique their own and others’ work by emphasizing global revision early in the writing process and local revision later in the process.
  5. Document their work using appropriate conventions (MLA).
  6. Control sentence-level error (grammar, punctuation, spelling).

 

Selection from Susan Gilroy, “Interrogating Texts: 6 Reading Habits to Develop in Your First Year at Harvard,” from Harvard Library: Research Guides (1980).

 

Make your reading thinking-intensive from start to finish. Annotating puts you actively and immediately in a “dialogue” with an author and the issues and ideas you encounter in a written text. It’s also a way to have an ongoing conversation with yourself as you move through the text and to record what that encounter was like for you…. Mark up the margins of your text with words and phrases: ideas that occur to you, notes about things that seem important to you, reminders of how issues in a text may connect with class discussion or course themes…. Get in the habit of hearing yourself ask questions: “What does this mean?” “Why is the writer drawing that conclusion?” “Why am I being asked to read this text?” etc….They are reminders of the unfinished business you still have with a text….

 

Take the information apart, look at its parts, and then try to put it back together again in language that is meaningful to you…. Outlining enables you to see the skeleton of an argument: the thesis, the first point and evidence (and so on), through the conclusion. With weighty or difficult readings, that skeleton may not be obvious until you go looking for it. Summarizing accomplishes something similar, but in sentence and paragraph form, and with the connections between ideas made explicit. Analyzing adds an evaluative component to the summarizing process…. What is the writer asserting? What am I being asked to believe or accept? Facts? Opinions? Some mixture? What reasons or evidence does the author supply to convince me? Where is the strongest or most effective evidence the author offers…?

 

Set course readings against each other to determine their relationships (hidden or explicit). At what point in the term does this reading come? Why that point, do you imagine? How does it contribute to the main concepts and themes of the course? How does it compare (or contrast) to the ideas presented by texts that come before it? Does it continue a trend, shift direction, or expand the focus of previous readings? How has your thinking been altered by this reading? How has it affected your response to the issues and themes of the course?

 

Guidelines/Suggestions

 

  1. You might treat the five-part framing statement as five distinct reflection statements instead of a single letter.

 

  1. Recommend that students create a set of child pages to house the individual statements and Significant Writing Project evidence. The following structure will work reasonably well (others can also work):

 

  • ENG 110
    • Showcase Writing Project (Page briefly summarizes/explains the project and includes ungraded PDF versions of both first and final drafts of the project.)
    • Learning Outcome 1 (Page includes framing statement)
    • Learning Outcome 2 (Page includes framing statement)
    • Learning Outcome 3 (Page includes framing statement, in addition to links to PDF samples of both reading evidence and selected informal reading responses)
    • Learning Outcome 4 (Page includes framing statement, in addition to PDF
    • Learning Outcomes 5 & 6 (Page includes framing statement)
    • Recursive Writing Sheet (Page includes copy of sheet along with framing statement)