A Study On Influence Of Dynamic Assessment On Senior School Students' English Writing

A quantity of studies on teaching assessment have been conducted in recent years in China, and most of them focus on summative tests. With uniform content and mechanical criteria, summative tests attach much importance to the learning results, neglecting the learning process. However, Dynamic Assessment(DA hereafter) challenges conventional views on teaching and assessment and indicates that instruction and assessment should not be considered as separate activities; instead, they should be fully assumed as an integrated one(Sayyed & Mahboubeh, 2014). Prevailing in foreign countries since 1960 s, DA was introduced in China in 1990 s. A number of discussions at the theory level of DA in language education provide guidance for empirical or practical studies. This paper focuses on applying DA-oriented writing teaching framework to conduct an experimental study with the students in senior school.The present study was carried out in Jiangxi Nankang No.3 Middle School. The participants in this study were 116 Senior One students, including two parallel classes. The thesis mainly studies the following two questions:1) Does the implementation of DA have any significant impact on students' attitude in writing?2) Is there any statistically significant difference in students' scores on pretest and posttest of writing after DA procedure?After four-month English writing teaching, the present study has showed the following major findings: 1) from the results of the pre-questionnaires, the author has found that most students showed low interest and confidence in English writing. Therefore, their writing initiative and proficiency would be influenced to some extent; 2) as reflected in the post-questionnaires, most students' attitude toward English writing has turned out to be more positive than that of before,showing higher interest and confidence in English writing; 3) experiment-group students' posttest scores were significantly higher than those of the control group, indicating that Dynamic Assessment is an effective way to improve students' English writing competence; 4) DA-oriented writing teaching enhanced interaction in student-student and student-teacher communication.Based on the findings, the study provides some pedagogical implications for the future English writing assessment. Although there are a few limitations and some problems need to be further explored, this study is a creative one in the studies of English writing teaching in senior school.