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After studying a foreign language during their time at Lafayette, how well prepared are students to answer the question “What do you know in your second language and what can you do with this knowledge?”
Thanks to the Lafayette World Languages e-Portfolio Initiative, students who have built an e-Portfolio have no problem answering that question.
Mary Toulouse, director of the Language Laboratory, Amanda Furtado Sampaio ’16, and Professor Michelle Geoffrion-Vinci go over Sampaio’s LaFolio in the Foreign Language and Literatures Resource Center.
LaFolio is a digital archive that documents the achievement of specific language learning goals and provides a multi-dimensional, interactive résumé that can be shared electronically.
“E-Portfolio provides me a space where I can record and review all the progress I’ve made in language studies as well as other aspects of college life. By collecting details of what I’ve done, it tells a story about me,” says Lanxin “Natalie” Zhang ’17 (Gaomi, China), who is studying Spanish, and plans to double major in art and economics.
There are more than 400 Lafayette e-Portfolios in various stages of development at the College’s Foreign Language and Literatures Resource Center.
“LaFolio allows for the holistic integration of student academic pursuits, their travel experiences, their community engagement, and their co-curricular leadership,” says Michelle Geoffrion-Vinci, associate professor of Spanish. “It helps us as faculty and program facilitators better understand what our students get out of our courses and programs and helps us determine if we’re going in the right direction or in what ways we might improve our offerings.”
In constructing LaFolio, the faculty surveyed Lafayette alumni regarding the kind of information they would find useful if reviewing an e-portfolio of a potential job candidate.
The framework reflects this feedback and includes a personal profile page that allows for easy navigation of information and multimedia, documentation of external language skills, and a place where students can demonstrate their writing proficiency, cultural literacy, communicative competence, and technological fluency.
“The DIY style of constructing my own page helped me develop skills for communicating with viewers and how to deliver my thoughts effectively,” Zhang says.