A Study On The Effectiveness Of Dynamic Assessment In Junior English Writing Teaching

Writing is not only an important component of English teaching,but also a comprehensive reflection of the ability of using English.However,English writing is the most difficult one to develop among all the skills of learning English.With the deepening of the reform of basic education curriculum,people pay more and more attention to English writing teaching,especially the transition of the traditional writing assessments.At present,there are two main problems of the English writing teaching in basic education:one is that students cannot receive systematic guidance of English writing;while the other is that the traditional writing assessments are not conductive to improve students' writing ability.The traditional writing assessments mainly focus on the results but neglect students' development in the process of writing,which is detrimental to help students stimulate their learning potential and let teachers take actions to help students improve their writing ability.Therefore,it is very necessary to introduce a new method of assessment.In recent years,Dynamic Assessment(DA)has become a hot research topic in the field of foreign language teaching in abroad.However,the researches of DA in China are absolutely rare and most of them are limited to the theoretical discussion and lack of empirical data.By reading through the relevant studies at home and abroad,the author found that studies in our country failed to provide detailed steps of dynamic assessment and there were very few relevant researches on the effectiveness of applying DA in basic education.Therefore,the present study tries to apply the theories of DA into junior English writing teaching to build up a workable and effective DA framework.This study will explore whether it can improve students' perception of English writing and English writing ability.This thesis mainly focuses on the following two questions:(1)Will DA improve students' perception of English writing more effectively than static assessment?(2)Will DA enhance students' writing ability more effectively than static assessment?In order to answer the first question,the author makes two questionnaires to investigate the results.At first,the students were asked to write a composition and the scores of the composition were used as the data of the pre-test to test whether the students of the two classes were in the same level of English writing.The results of the data showed that there was no significant difference of the writing level of the students.Therefore,the author made one of the classes as the experimental class and made the other one as the control class.The two classes used the same writing teaching materials but were taught by different teaching methods.In the experimental class,the teacher integrated DA with teaching to assess students' writing.However,different from the way carried out in the experiment class,the teacher used static assessment which only focused on the product of writing in the control class.The author made the last writing task as the post-test and analyzed the data to test whether DA could enhance students' writing ability more effective than static assessment.In order to make the study scientific and reliable,the author also analyzed the scores of length,idea,structure,and language knowledge of the composition to test the influence of the two kinds of evaluation on writing.After a semester of teaching experiment and the analysis of the data,the author concluded that DA would make more effective effect on improving students' writing cognition and ability than static assessment.The author hopes that the present study can be a good reference of junior writing teaching and expects the DA framework to be widely used in English education,which can greatly improve the quality of teaching.