Dynamic Assessment On Chinese EFL Learners Acquisition Of Target Grammatical Structures

Dynamic assessment (DA) combines instruction and assessment as a monist activity. Its theoretical foundation mainly originated from Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of mind (SCT), according to which the full landscape of one’s cognitive functions should both include the already mature cognitive functions and those maturing ones. Unlike traditional assessment which only accounts for the ripened cognitive functions, DA seeks to account for both and transform the ripening ones into ripened by providing mediation sensitive to learner’s zone of proximal development. With several foreign empirical studies applying DA to learners at different levels of proficiency and displaying effectiveness in helping learners gain certain development, the present study is among the first attempts to apply interactionist DA to the Chinese EFL context to investigate whether DA can help diagnose developmental levels in terms of the target grammatical features more accurately and truly promote the acquisition of these grammatical features.Through piloting, the author chose three grammatical structures, the past perfect tense, the passive voice of different tenses and the relative clause and selected5low level English learners who made the most errors on these features to participate in the4-week main study, which was composed of5static assessment (SA) sessions (SA1,2,3, posttest and transcendence task), and four DA sessions (DA1,2,3and transfer DA session). The test materials are Chinese-to-English sentence translations and text translation. In all the DA sessions, the author provided implicit-to-explicit form of mediation which all arose from the moment-to-moment mediator-learner interaction. The transcripts of all the DA sessions and the test papers constituted the data of the study. By comparing between learners and comparing each learner’s performance over time, the author provides positive answers to the research questions.