Dynamic Assessment On Senior High School EFL Learners’ Acquisition Of Non-finite Verbs

Dynamic Assessment,deeply rooted in Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory,is an interactive method which integrates assessment and instruction into a unified activity.Traditional static assessment can only assess learners’ matured abilities.In DA,the assessor can promote learners’ development by giving them proper mediation and diagnose their development level simultaneously.Currently,there have been some researches on applying DA to the instruction of foreign language grammar abroad,and it has proven the effectiveness of DA mode on promoting learners’ development of target grammatical knowledge.However,as an important issue in foreign language teaching,there are relatively scarce DA researches on grammar teaching in China,not to mention the instruction of non-finite verbs.Therefore,this thesis selected non-finite verbs as the target grammar point and took six students who are from the second year of The First Senior High School of Ruyang as the participants.It aimed at investigating whether DA can effectively diagnose learners’ development level of non-finite verbs and further facilitate their acquisition.The experiment included a pre-test,a post test and five DA sessions.The test materials used in the pre-test and post test were gap-filling questions,while in the five DA sessions were Chinese-English translation items.During the DA phase,participants first completed the translation tests independently,and then the author helped them by providing them with proper mediation,following the “implicit to explicit” principle.Using the transcript of the interaction between the assessor and participants as the main data,the research compared the mediation strategies required by different participants and analyzed the changes of the mediation strategies required to achieve at the correct form for each student throughout the five sessions.The results of the study were as follows: ⑴DA mediational interaction activities revealed some obstacles to the Chinese high school English learners’ development of non-finite verbs.⑵DA could assess Chinese high school English learners’ mastery of non-finite verbs precisely and help diagnose the development level of different learners.⑶ DA mediation could further promote learners’ acquisition of non-finite verbs by providing them with mediation.The significance of this study is to provide some practical implications for middle school English grammar teaching,given the effectiveness of DA on diagnosing learners’ developmental level and promoting learners’ acquisition of non-finite verbs.In addition,learners’ obstacles to learning non-finite verbs revealed in the research might provide some reference to the instruction of non-finite verbs in middle school.