W 041 F

Introduction
University students have always had to face the difficulties of writing essays for their classes. As this may be a source of problem for many of them, courses aimed at improving their academic skills in writing are started every semester in the English department of Janus Pannonius University (later referred to as JPU). These Writing and Research Skills courses, with Horváth József as a tutor, were announced at three different times under the codes ANG 1601, ANG 1602, ANG 1603.

One condition to complete the course was to write at least eight essays. Also, the tutor of the course asked participants to "keep a record" of their writings in a "dedicated notebook" (1). These collections were called portfolios.

Another task was to complete a research paper. Several possibilities were offered as the topics of these papers. One of these was the content analyses of at least five portfolios.

My purpose in completing this survey was to find out more of the contents of course participants' portfolios and to provide information concerning their main characteristics.

Method
Five students participated in this survey, all of whom were attending Writing and Research Skills courses at JPU in the fall semester of 1997. All of them were at their first year at the English Department, four were English majors and one was a 9th semester Italian major. I made no special distinction between students when I asked them to take part in this survey; they were chosen on the basis of our relationship. Students involved in the study will later be referred to as Student A, Student B, Student C, Student D and Student E.

I asked these students to share their portfolios with me to enable me to examine these collections closely and draw conclusions from them.

On the first WRS course students were offered several titles for their writing. These were the following:

* The lyrics of a rap song
* An introduction to a favourite novel, poem, short story, play or other text
* An afterword for the same text
* Three in one
* A high school graduation ceremony speech
* A travel guide to your home town
* A travel guide to JPU campus
* A travel guide to a Pécs site
* A travel guide to any place you've been to
* Profile of a person, based on interview
* A description of how a house, a bridge, a television set, a book, a pen, a pullover or some other object or construction is made
* The revised news story
* Truncate it: make each word longer than two syllables one syllable shorter in any text you choose
* A learning experience: personal essay on tape
Students had to choose at least eight options of these but were encouraged to "feel free to add pieces of their "own devising" (Horváth 1).
Later, during the semester the tutor offered twelve further subjects for the portfolios:
* A description of an unpleasant experience I have had (in four paragraphs maximum)
* A significant experience (or day or event) in my life
* A hobby that annoys me
* Why I don't like something that otherwise I would like to do
* Change the end (or the beginning and the end) of a short descriptive essay
* JPU by night (to be published in the university yearbook)
* A personal account of one of my holidays at Lake Balaton
* An essay about any subject with a narrative in it
* My pet (or domestic animal)
* My experiences with a royal family
* A description of environmental problems in the place (street, village or town where I live)
* A description of the interior of a shop

Results and discussion
To gain sufficient data of the portfolios I set up certain categories to fit essays in. My findings can be classified in three groups. The first aspect concerned the look of the notebooks, their size and what was written on their labels. The second viewpoint involved the essays: their number, topics, length measured in paragraphs and sentences, their method of distinguishing paragraphs, and whether the title and the content of the essays were in contact. The third aspect concerned tutorial remarks on, in and beside texts, and the numbers of J and L signs.(The tutor used these symbols to indicate his opinion of a part of the text or the whole writing.)

Notebooks and labels
There were three kinds of notebooks serving as portfolios: one spirally bound notebook of Student B, a middle-size one of Student C and three small-size ones of Students A, D and E.
As for the labels of the portfolios, three students included exact data: their names and the code and name of the course. Two participants had put only their names on the front.

Features of essays

Their number
Student B wrote the most essays, nine. Students A and D handed in eight writings and Students C and E had written four essays by the time of the completion of this paper.

Topics chosen
There were ten items among the subjects offered that none of the participants wrote about. Among the chosen ones Three in one was the most popular–all the five participants included it in their portfolios–and four students wrote a description of how he or she made coffee (one of the participants described how she made tea, but as this option could be chosen as well, I included her writing in those four).

Students wrote about the following topics:
Student A: 1. An afterword for Muriel Spark: The Driver's seat
2. An introduction to William Shakespeare: Twelfth Night
3. Three in one
4. A description of how to make coffee
5. The lyrics of a rap song
6. A quiz: How territorial are you?
7. A travel guide to a Pécs site
8. Revised news stories

Student B: Table of Contents
1. Make a cup of tea and relax!
2. Why are American students late for class? –based on a one year research at VVS High School Verona, NY
3. Three in one
4. A revised news story
5. Tapsi – a rabbit in our flat (my pet)
6. Drinking tea with Winnie the Pooh – revision of writing number 1
7. Truncate it!
8. A description of an unpleasant experience I have had
9. Surprise!

Student C: 1. Three in on
2. Description of a skipping-rope (a description of how an object or other construction is made)
3. Truncate it!
4. An unpleasant experience
Student D: 1. Three in one: Canada's Northward Expansion
2. The lyrics of a rap song
3. How to make a perfect coffee
4. A travel guide to my hometown
5. An introduction to my favourite book
6. An afterword for the book "44 Irish short stories"
7. Building a house by yourself is not as easy as you think (how an object or construction is made)
8. Playing hide-and-seek in a forest during a pitch-black night is real fun (a significant experience or day or event in my life)
Student E: 1. A travel guide to a Pécs site
2. Three in one
3. A travel guide to any place...
4. How I make coffee
1 Student B devoted two essays to the topic
2 Student C didn't choose this option

Table 1 and 2 shows the features of the two most popular topics

Table 3 – Student A
1 the text consists of one paragraph
version as well. First numbers show the number of sentences according to the tutor's writing. Second numbers show the data of the student's version.
2 The writing consists of only one paragraph
version as well. First numbers show the characteristics of the tutor's version. Second numbers show the data of the student's writing.
Table 1 and 2 show the features of the two most popular topics
Table 3,4,5 and 6 show the main features of essays

Length of essays
The number of paragraphs varied between nine and fifty-two per portfolio and between one and sixteen per essay. The number of sentences changed between 44 and 164 per portfolios and between six and forty-four per essays. As Table 3 shows, there was a correlation between the number of essays included in the portfolios and the number of sentences and paragraphs per portfolio.

Method of distinguishing paragraphs
In each portfolio paragraphs were clearly separated from each other either by blocking them or indenting the first line of each new section. Students C, D and E used only the method of indenting lines. Students A and B combined the two different techniques.

Title-content relationship
At five essays the reader couldn't guess to the content of the writing from its title, which is 15.1% of the whole.

Two introductions
During the semester students were offered the possibility to hand in essays without an introduction that the tutor would write for them. Yet they were asked to write an introduction of their own and then compare the two versions. This task was pointed at showing the students that there can be several different ways to introduce a composition. Three of the five participants—Students B, C and E—took this possibility.

Dates
Only one of these five students included the dates of writing of the essays in the portfolio, Student D. But even this table was not complete, as he offered the dates only for seven essays of the eight included in the portfolio.

Table of contents
Only Student B set up a Table of Contents at the beginning of her portfolio. This proved to be a useful idea and gained the tutor's approval. ("J Table of Contents! Useful. Good idea!" (1))

Tutor's remarks
Altogether 19 :) and 2 :( were in the texts. Their number showed correlation with the number of essays, but this was not significant because students who wrote 8 or 9 essays offered more chance to the tutor to express his opinion than those who wrote only four.

In one case the tutor used both signs at the same time to reflect a part of the 6th essay in Student D's portfolio: "You have written about many aspects of Irish literature. :)"
"But :( there is not much detail you go into."

The tutor put his remarks and corrections down in three ways. At the beginning of the course he asked students to write only on one side of their notebooks so that he could write his notes on the facing page. Secondly, he used stick–in notes that he put either to the writing or beside it. In addition, he corrected mistakes by putting marks in the texts.

By–text and stick–in notes had several functions:
–Some places the tutor asked students to consult him about their writing: "Please come to se me if you want to know more about what makes a narrative essay."(Student B 8)
–Wrote encouraging notes after the first essay: "Good start. Now, I'm looking forward to more."(Student C 8)
–Asked questions of various purposes: "Have you been reading a lot of Hegel, Freud and Jung recently?"(Student A 1); "Is there anything you've discovered about this text in its verbal layer?"(Student E 8);
–Commented on errors to help students to avoid similar mistakes in their further writing: "Never hide specific words in parentheses"(Student B 3); "Underline (or italicise in printing) titles of novels and plays."(Student A 2)
–Corrected comma splices and run-ons

Conclusion
When I started the project I had only one major expectation concerning the outcome of the survey. I hypothesised that the most popular essay topics would be those that seemed to be the easiest. These were Three in one; A description of how you make coffee, shave or apply make-up and any of the Travel guide options. Three in one seemed to be easy because—as university students are long familiar with parts of speech—their only task was to find a text, write it down and select nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. The other two suggestions offered subjects students must be also familiar with.

My presumptions proved to be true. All participants selected Three in one, and four compositions were written about the Description... and Travel guide... subjects.

As for the other characteristics of the portfolios the only significant finding I can report is that they were a pleasure to read and that I was delighted to invent students' willingness in sharing their writing with others.

The main idea of collecting students' writings in notebooks was to keep the essays together and enable the tutor of the course to give constant feedback on them, so students had the possibility to develop the quality of their writing according to the tutor's suggestions.

Yet the real benefit of the portfolio approach cannot be proved now and not even at the end of the course. Its main advantage will come up in the 9 remaining semesters during which students will have to hand in many essays. And after completing the course they can do it with full confidence.