Microgenetic Study Of Dynamic Assessment Process Of English Writing

Writing skill is one of the most difficult language skills to improve for English learners in our country. Writing assessment is one important part of writing instruction, but the relevant studies are very few. At present, writing assessment methods widely used in our country are result-oriented, which neither efficiently helps learners improve writing ability nor promotes writing instruction. Hence, it is important and necessary to bring in new writing assessment method. In a recent decade, dynamic assessment research in foreign language pedagogy domain became flourished in west countries, but the relevant studies in our country are relatively few. Most of studies focused on the theory introduction, the empirical studies are fewer. By reading through the relevant studies at home and abroad, the present studies found that studies in our country paid little attention to dynamic assessment process exploration and there were no relevant research on the variation of effect of dynamic assessment over a period of time. As a consequence, the present study aims to explore dynamic assessment process and its effect on diagnosing and promoting learners’ writing ability.The present study adopted microgenetic method to conduct dynamic assessment experiment on four high school grade three students, lasting for five weeks. Each week one dynamic assessment experiment would be carried out, including pretest, dynamic assessment intervention, posttest and interview. In the pretest, four subjects were required to write a composition about 120 words in 30 minutes. In the next day, one-to-one dynamic assessment mediation process took place to discuss the problems in learners’ composition, after mediation process, subjects were asked for rewrite composition in the posttest. And then an interview followed. All dialogues and conversations would be recorded to qualitatively analyze dynamic assessment in a microgenetic way, and all compositions were quantitatively analyzed to see the effect of dynamic assessment intervention. The major findings of the present study are listed as follows:(1) In the dynamic assessment process, the major mediational strategies used are request for learner’s independent correction, identify problem area, metalinguistic clue, provide correct pattern and provide explicit explanation. And the primary learner responses moves are no response, ask for additional assistance, incorporate feedback and use mediator as resource.(2) Dynamic assessment can efficiently assess and promote learners’ writing ability, and the more the times of dynamic assessment, the better the efficiency.(3) After dynamic assessment intervention, learners have a significant improvement in accuracy and vocabulary complexity and have no significant change in fluency and grammatical complexity.In terms of theoretical significance, the present study provides empirical examples for dynamic assessment research in the field of second language pedagogy and offers a new view and new method to the foreign language teaching in our country. In practical, it enriches and diversifies writing assessment methods and provides implications for improving efficiency of writing assessment.