Improving university students' cooperation skills through portfolio projects: A pilot study

Abstract

In the autumn semester of the academic year 2019/2020, a portfolio approach was introduced and piloted in one of the ESP courses offered by Budapest Business School's Faculty of Finance and Accountancy. Besides developing ESP skills, the portfolio tasks developed for the purpose of this research and introduced during the research project reported herein were intended to improve students' cooperation skills, which are essential in the job market. At the beginning of the same semester in order to forecast how successful this portfolio approach could be, we intended to obtain insights into our students' initial attitudes towards cooperation with peers and wished to look into the likelihood of participants' positive reception of cooperation-purpose portfolio tasks. To this end, a quantitative questionnaire study was carried out through an online platform amongst 49 Hungarian university students. This paper presents the results of this study. First, the relevant theoretical background is presented, namely, cooperation as a soft skill and its subskills. Then the possibilities and opportunities of improving cooperation skills during ESP classes are discussed: in the scope of our study, relying on the methodological approach offered by of the European Language Portfolio, cooperation skills were developed through cooperation-purpose portfolio tasks. Next, our study describes the quantitative questionnaire study, its administration and the resulting data. Our results show that students have a positive initial attitude towards cooperation with peers and cooperation-purpose portfolio tasks, and it has been found that the portfolio approach used in this research project seems to be a useful strategy for developing participants' cooperation skills.