An Empirical Study Of Dynamic Assessment In College English Process Writing

Among the skills of English learning, writing is a comprehensive skill, which can manifest students’ overall ability in the language. So a suitable and available approachshould be explored to improve students’ writing ability. Under the instruction of dynamic assessment and process writing, teachers tend to help students write more effectively by aiding them in the specific writing process, by finding the root of problems. Dynamic assessment aims to explore and inspire learners’ potential development capacity through intervention and interaction between the teachers and learners. There are two models of dynamic assessment, which are interactionist dynamic assessment and interventionist dynamic assessment(Lantolf & Poehner, 2004). In this study, the researcher mainly adopted interactionist dynamic assessment. Students are fully involved in student-centered classroom atmosphere where students’ writing problems tend to be found and solved more easily and promptly. Therefore, this study aims to explore the effectiveness of dynamic assessment in English writing, in order to improve college students’ ability of English writing.Currently, there are few empirical studies about dynamic assessment, and studies on the application of dynamic assessment in English writingare relatively limited. Therefore, the researcher puts forward the following research questions:(1) What is the effect of dynamic assessment on college English processwriting?(2) What is the college students’ change of interest in English writing after application of dynamic assessment in process writing?85 students in one college in Liaoning province were selected by the researcher to conduct this research, which lasted one semester. The research instruments include a pre-test, a post-test, two questionnaires and the interview. The data of the study was described and analyzed by SPSS17.0 software. The result shows that the dynamic assessment has a positive impact on English writing. Meanwhile, these college students’ English writing performance as wellas interest in writing has been significantly improved. Most of them like English writing class, and some good writing habits have been cultivated. Some pedagogical implications are proposed in the end.