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Introduction

The success of the lectures depends both on the students and teachers; therefore lecturers have to pay considerable attention on the effectiveness of the teaching. Writers of the English Department are to submit many essays to the different courses where they have to fulfil certain requirements. The basis of the essays' style is academic writing therefore the fitness centre, the "Writing and Research Skills course", is very important for university students studying English.
In this research paper I intend to investigate a part of the training process applied by Horváth József, a tutor of the English Department at Janus Pannonius University: how beneficial the system of using portfolios for improving academic writing is. This is one of the major reasons for my choosing Content Analysis of at Least Five Portfolios from the options of themes offered by the tutor. The other was to demonstrate the most frequent mistakes made by students so that the writers could improve their style of writing, and the teacher could see how remunerative and practical his procedure is. By analysing the essays in each portfolio I wish to discover whether it would perform a function for other lecturers to adopt the method analysed, or whether there is a need for modification in the portfolio process.

Method

There were six portfolios at my disposal including mine as well: one from ANG 1601, three from ANG 1602, and two from ANG 1603- Ang 1601, ANG 1602, and ANG 1603 are the courses for improving academic writing at JPU. Altogether, I found 36 essays in the dedicated notebooks which I investigated according to content analysis.

Content analysis is an objective way of finding generalities, results and conclusions in research based on the system of classification which requires the researcher to read each work thoroughly; I read every portfolio three times. I categorized each essay according to ten aspects: did the essay have a title; was the title underlined; was there a date referring to the creation of the piece; was the comment of teacher positive; were the comments suggested by teacher accepted and adopted; mistakes corrected; mistakes not corrected; number of paragraphs in each essay; was there a smiling face ( :) ); was there a sad face ( :( ).

Having graded each essay according to the items, I compared the same aspects of each portfolio. Thus I was able to see whether there were any similarities or features allowing me to draw concrete conclusions. So my personal opinion does not influence the results of the research which is the proof for justifying the objectivity of content analysis.

Results and Discussion

The first step of my investigation, that is reading and filling blanks of tables, is presented in the following evaluation figures. If there is an "x" in the table it means that the essay had a title; the title was underlined; there was a date indicating the piece' s day of creation; the teacher gave positive comments on the essay; the student adopted the instructions; mistakes were corrected; one mistake was not corrected; there was a drawing.

Titles

In the comparison of the six tables it turned out that most of the students did not give a title- though they were asked to do so. The tutor, Horváth József, wrote the following advice to Úz Márk' s portfolio, who is a student in ANG 1601:

"I suggest you give a title to all your subsequent essays in this portfolio. This would be useful for you when you look for one, and me when I begin reading a new piece. And it would be useful to other students who may read the portfolio." The same was proposed to Harmath Virág, who is a student in ANG 1602: "P.S. And please remember to give a title to each of your writings in this portfolio." Altogether, there were two instructions that implied giving a title in the collections of writings. According to the tables showing the statistics, there were more notebooks without titles of essays than with titles.

Horváth indicated that the dating of writings is beneficial both for the teacher and the student or for other scholars reading (or analysing) the portfolios. Only two writers out of six dated and underlined the titles of the writings and the rest of the students did not follow the example. Not only did Úz and Harmath forget to date the essays, but they did not adopt the tutor' s first negative comment, that is the portfolio used as a source of communication was not successful in this respect, which suggests that a greater emphasis should have been put on the correction in order to make student realise the significance of the comment. Of course there were examples of asking the student for adopting the pieces of pieces of advice and for revision of the text as well.

Comments and correction

Juxtaposing the quantity of positive comments and the number of mistakes detected and corrected by teacher, I drew the conclusion that there were more corrections than positive comments. This means in general that there was a lot to be improved in the style of academic writing of the six students.

I found the following comments praising the style of essays: detailed introduction, coherent paragraph, good description, and adequate style. Horváth was thankful for giving source of the Three in One piece, for a personal account and for accepting pieces of pieces of advice. Comments about revisions seemed to be especially approving.

I collected all the mistakes found in the portfolios of the six students and made a list where I put them in order of frequency (see Table 7 below). There were various cases when the mistake corrected in the previous essay was repeated in the following one, which signifies lack of revision, but opposed to this the teaching was remunerative when considering the comment approving of review of essay. Horváth asked for simplification and clarification for more occasions and due to this in most of the instances students- such as Csontos Zsuzsanna who rewrote "How to Apply Make-up" or Makra Melinda, who simplified the "How a See-saw is made" essay- accomplished the task.

Analysing the portfolios, I found a few mistakes which were not corrected. Most of them were rather spelling mistakes, for example in the notebook of Schlõgl Krisztián: "Each and every piece of work of this collection shows the peculiarity and uniqueness o Irish English"; "Do business only with well known and reliable craftmen so as to avoid your home from collapsing two or three years later". Úz Márk wrote oppinion instead of opinion in his essay, "The Lyrics of a rap song".

Number of Paragraphs

As we can see from Table 7 most of the students have serious problems with coherence of the text, that is they are uncertain about the usage of paragraphs. For example, Csontos Zsuzsanna does not finish a thought started but goes to another different theme included in the same paragraph. Although the tutor emphasises by telling and showing the students the significance of coherence, most of the students do not apply the method suggested by teacher.

The infrequency of drawings in the portfolios is depressing for the writers. It is indicated in Table 1 that there was a sad face drawn in the fifth essay next to the comment correcting the most serious mistake. Due to this, the comment was adopted in the sixth writing. Smiling faces inspire students for writing again. Table 1 shows that the tutor drew a smiling face next to the fifth, sixth, and seventh essays. Dates indicated that there was only a few days difference between the writing of essays.

Conclusion

The evaluation of the six portfolios confirms some of my perceptions. According to the results of the research paper the system of using portfolios for improving academic writing of students studying English is essential and indispensable. Students have to write an enormous amount of essays during the five years spent in the university and writing is a fundamental basis of the realisation of the wish of everyone: the best mark for the essay ("5"). As Table 7 shows the frequency of mistakes is another factor contributing to the significance of teaching "Writing and Research Skills". There might have been some mistakes which have not been corrected, but this could have been because the teacher gave the opportunity for writers to revise the essay, and it would be the student who recognises his or her own mistake and not the tutor.

I hope that every student will find some pieces of useful information in my research paper instigating them to change their way of writing if necessary. In the process of making content analysis I had the opportunity to know other students from a different point of view and in addition to this my vocabulary expanded as well.