The effectivenes of online portfolios in developing students' writing skills in Business English classrooms

In the context of globalization within information technology era, the application of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for language learning has always been the matter of concern every educator has to wrestle with. The purpose of this study is to look into the use of online portfolios as part of ICT in teaching writing skills in Business English classrooms at a university of foreign language studies in Viet Nam. This study was carried out on two groups – experimental and control groups- each of which consists of 50 second-year students at Danang University of Foreign Language Studies. Before the intervention, both of the two groups were given pre-test of business letter writing. During the intervention, the experimental group was taught with the aid of online portfolios and the control group was taught through the conventional instruction. At the final stage, a post-test was administered to the two  groups. Independent samples t-test and paired samples ttest were applied so as to compare differences within the groups. The results obtained from the pre-test and post-test could prove the statistically significant difference in terms of test scores between the experimental and control groups, which confirms that online portfolios are effective in improving writing skills in Business English classrooms. The research puts forward thoughtful pedagogical implications for the application of online portfolios as effective ICT tools for improving students" writing skills in Business English contexts.