A Case Analysis Of Dynamic Assessment On Translation Performance

In the second language acquisition, dynamic assessment is gradually becoming ascientific means of assessing the quality and effectiveness of teaching. Dynamicassessment of classroom teaching is a process focusing on assessing the interactionsamong teachers, students and learning tasks. The student-centered teaching idea hasmade it difficult for traditional summative assessment which only reflects result oflearning to conduct an objective and scientific assessment of English classroomteaching procedure. Therefore, as an important part of teaching activities, dynamicassessment of classroom teaching will contribute to getting a comprehensiveunderstanding of the gap between teaching and learning in the process of teaching,and enhancing students ’ self-confidence for learning, stimulating their motivation forlearning. In the course of such an assessment, the assessor should have a dialoguewith the assessed, aiming at making appropriate judgment for the behaviors of theassessed after they finish a learning task and exploring how to make these behaviorsable to affect the learning process in the future. This study focuses on the facilitativeeffect of dynamic assessment under the context of sci-tech translation.The sandwich-model test was adopted in this study. During the one-week processof sci-tech translation teaching, the translation results of experimental group andcontrol group before and after adopting dynamic assessment were contrasted.Through describing the application of the two main forms of dynamicassessment----intervention and interaction in the experimental group, the applicationeffects of dynamic assessment were evaluated according to the amount of reminderand the results of the two tests. By connecting the cognitive theory and the transfertheory during translation, we discovered the laws of teachers’ guidance andsummarized the types of teachers’ guidance. And after analyzing the reflection ofstudents from the experimental group on translation tasks, we conclude that dynamicassessment has positive effects on translation.The research questions are:1. By comparing the pretest and posttest, whattranslation changes do the students will have after teachers’ intervention andinteraction?2. In which way do DA improve the students’ translation performance?3. What influences do the DA lay on the translation process?There are mainly three discoveries in the study:First, students from experimental group in which dynamic assessment wasapplied achieved significantly better translation results than those from control group.In other words, dynamic assessment has played an important part in students’translation practice.Second, in the experimental group adopting dynamic assessment, there wasobvious difference in the demand of reminder, the reminder types, and frequencybetween students in higher level and those in lower level.Thirdly, from the retrospective interview, we found that the teachers’modification has positive effects on students from both the higher and lower levelgroup.Discoveries noted above can provide following enlightenments for teachingpractices: Both the intervention and interaction need the higher requirement ofteachers and the teachers’ language capabilities as well as the longitude time andsufficient energy laid on mediation. Besides, the size of the discussion group isanother factor taken into consideration.