The Application Of Dynamic Assessment To English Writing Instructions In Senior High Schools

Writing, as one of the fundamental language skills, may be the most difficult part for Chinese EFL learners. Although researches on writing instructions are quite a lot,few of them can be efficiently applied to the statues quo in high schools, especially in terms of writing assessment. At present, writing assessment in our country is still result-oriented, which relies mostly on static assessment. To some degree, it not only ignores the development during the learning process, but also fails to help measure their potential development of ability. In order to make up for the shortcomings of static assessment, a newly-born notion - dynamic assessment, comes into being,which brings the profound power to the reform of L2 learning assessment.Based on the sociocultural theory of Vygotsky, the present study investigates into a large number of new research reports on DA both at home and abroad,and finds that few domestic researches are concerned with the intra-exploration of the DA process.Thus,this study attempts to seek more insights of the changes that occur during the DA process and testify the efficacy of dynamic assessment on promoting learners’writing ability. In specific, three research questions are proposed:(1)What are the tutor’s mediational strategies during DA? And how do they change over four DA sessions?(2) What are the learner responses engaged in DA? And how do they change over four DA sessions?(3) Is there any significant improvement in students’ writing performance after four DA sessions?The experiment mainly adopts the microgenetic method, whose participants are four senior-three students. It lasts for eight weeks, which is made up of participants selection,pre-test, four DA sessions,post-test and interview,taking a questionnaire,transcriptions and an interview as research instruments to assist the microgenetic analysis. The findings of this study is listed as follows:(1) There are five main types of tutor’s mediational strategies engaged in the process of DA, including request for learner ’s independent correction, reminder of directions, metalinguistic clues, providing correct responses and providing explanations. With times of DA mediation increasing, the tutor tends to use more implicit mediational strategies than explicit ones in the interactive dialogues.(2) There are four main types of the learner responses involved in the four DA sessions, including unresponsiveness, request for additional assistance, incorporating feedback and using mediator as a resource. With times of DA sessions increasing,learners tend to engage more active utterances and less passive ones in response.(3) In terms of the effect of dynamic assessment, there is significant progress in the vocabulary complexity, language fluency and accuracy, while the improvement of grammatical complexity is not significant.In conclusion, this study does make some contributions both theoretically and practically. One one hand, it summarizes some features and changes that occur in the process of DA, and proves the efficacy of DA on L2 writing instruction. On the other hand, the success of this case study provides some implications for the writing assessment in practical teaching context, which helps lead the development of writing assessment to more diversified ways.