ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF USING THE ELP

WHAT WOULD BE THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF USING THE ELP WITH MY GROUPS?

The European Language Portfolio is a personal document of a learner. In this document learners of all ages can record their language learning and cultural experiences at school or outside school. 

On the one hand, the ELP is used as a means of making the language learning process more transparent to learners, helping them to develop their capacity for reflection and self- assessment, and on the other hand help them gradually to assume more and more responsibility for their own learning.

When I think to use ELP on my class I find a lot of advantages. In my opinion, our students are more motivated, more creative and more active because is a voluntary work. They spend more time thinking about their language abilities and knowledge. Using the ELP the parents, teachers and the students are informed about the progress.

An other advantage, I think one of the most important is that using the ELP we spend more time focused on communication than on grammar mistakes. That is important because we give the students the opportunity to practice actively the foreign language.

However, on my point of view, nowadays it is really difficult to use this tool at class. Firstly, some descriptors are difficult to understand for our children, for example It is difficult for they to identify particular levels, and there are not specific enough for small children. Secondly, in the school the level of our students it is not so high and the time they need to pass from beginner to near-native-speaker is a long period of time and the progress on the portfolio is really slow and this demotivates the students and they quickly lose interest in the Portfolio.

To sum up, I think it is a really interesting purpose to introduce in our classroom but we need to use more tools to motivate our students and change the kind of teaching. It is necessary a change  but it is not always possible.