Students’ and Teachers’ Views on the Portfolio Component of the English Foundation Programme

As the use of paper-based portfolios and, more recently, ePortfolios began to attract unprecedented significance in many educational learning contexts, many researchers in the field of second and foreign language learning also began to look more closely into their effects from diverse aspects. Nevertheless, a small number of them have addressed the issue from teachers’ and students’ points of view in a comparative frame. This issue is even more noticeable in the Middle East, where portfolio learning has lately been incorporated in tertiary-level studies. Hence, this study compares students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the portfolio component of the English Foundation Program at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. In this regard, seventy-eight students and nine teachers participated in the study, where students expressed their ideas through a questionnaire and the teachers were interviewed to see how they perceive the portfolio element of the course. Using a mixed-methods design for data collection and analysis, several chi-square tests were run to see if there was any significant difference between the perceptions of students and teachers. The results of the study showed that although the students generally agreed on the usefulness of the component, the teachers believed that it has lost its meaning.