The Effects Of Dynamic Assessment On EFL Learners' Reading Comprehension And Strategies In Junior High School

For a long time,teachers have assessed students' reading level and strategy mainly by static assessment during the English reading test but seldom use dynamic way to assess.The study of dynamic assessment on foreign language teaching in China mainly focuses on the introduction to the theory,while the empirical research is relatively little,especially in the field of English reading teaching.Therefore,this paper is based on the domestic and foreign research,which aims to explore the dynamic assessment teaching mode that is consistent with the characteristics of English reading course in order to supply the traditional static assessment.Therefore,this study mainly answers the following two questions:(1)What are the effects of dynamic assessment on English reading comprehension?(2)What are the effects of dynamic assessment on reading strategies?The experiment is based on the zone of proximal development and the “Interventionist” framework of dynamic assessment constructed by domestic and foreign scholars.The researcher did teaching 8-week experiment on 40 junior middle school students in Qinan county,Tianshui with dynamic assessment in English reading teaching.At the beginning of the experiment,the researchers applied pretests and a strategy questionnaire to record the initial reading level and the condition of using reading strategies about students.Next,the teacher carried on the training session for the students.Training session includes three steps,which are extensive reading,intensive reading and reflective reading.The reflective reading is aimed at finishing inference questions.During each steps,students would be offered different prompts from implicit to explicit focusing on main idea questions,guessing words questions,detail questions and inference questions in each session.After the training session,teacher would conduct an assessment on students' reading achievement and reading strategies in order to know about how much students have mastered the four-type questions.The assessment includes three steps.First,students would be given a reading test.Second,students would finish some practice and teacher would classify students' errors and conduct further training.The content of practice is designed according to the above training steps,which transform some subjective questions to lead students to find answers.Third,investigate students reading strategies.Then,teacher would conduct a transfer training for students according to students' errors as well as questionnaires.Students' errors could be divided into 7 conditions,which conclude 3 domains such as main idea questions,guessing words questions,inference questions.Focusing on the 3-type questions,teacher would arrange 3 lessons to explain.After each lessons,students is asked to finish tests and reading questionnaires.At the end of whole experiment,students would do a posttest and questionnaires to test their reading comprehension.Through the analysis of the data,the results are as follows:(1)Most students' reading scores has improved by dynamic assessment.Students' scores in transfer training test improved quickly compared with other tests.And,students of middle level can make evident progress.It shows that the method is more effective for the middle level students.In addition,the students can make obvious progress in main idea questions that improved 1.4 points compared with posttest.But it is not obvious in detail questions and inference questions.(2)Dynamic assessment can cultivate students' awareness of using reading strategies.In terms of reading strategies,students used those two kinds of strategy frequently including the skimming and guessing words.Besides,if reading strategies correspond to reading questions type,it shows that the frequency of strategies about main idea improved quickly.Because of the small number of samples and short cycle,there has been some limitations in the experiment itself.However,the study is a new attempt for dynamic assessment in English reading teaching,which provides a new perspective and practical support for foreign language teaching.