A Study Of The Effects Of Dynamic Assessment On College English Writing Instrlctios

This thesis is based on Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory of Mind and the Zone of Proximal Development concept.The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of dynamic assessment on college non-English majors' writing ability.The author adopts the DA procedural framework“pretest-mediation-posttest” model in which the subjects' original English writing level is measured before mediation and the subjects' current English writing level is also tested after mediation.Put it another way,this model aims to testify the effects of mediation during the experiment.Applying DA to college English writing instruction,the author intends to answer the following two research questions:(1)Does dynamic assessment have an effect on non-English majors' English writing? If yes,what are the effects?(2)What are the subjects' perceptions of dynamic assessment?Ninety non-English majors were divided into two groups.One group used DA-based English writing teaching mode(experimental group);the other one received the traditional writing teaching(control group).After one semester,the author adopted tests,questionnaire,and interview to collect research data and used SPSS 18.0 to analyze the data collected.The results demonstrated that dynamic assessment is effective in improving college non-English majors' writing ability.It was obviously found that compared with the pretest mean scores of the experimentalclass,the posttest mean scores of the learners were increased after the experiment.However,there was almost no difference between the pretest mean scores and the posttest mean scores of the control class.In addition,it was also concluded that students thought highly of DA and that DA could stimulate students' writing awareness and help them form a good writing habit.This study has explored a new and effective way to enhance the teaching of English writing.