A Study On The Application Of Interventionist Dynamic Assessment To English Writing Instruction In Senior High School

In terms of the four language skills of listening,speaking,reading and writing,writing was a basic skill for Chinese EFL(English as a Foreign Language)learners to achieve successful English communication.Thus,English writing instruction became increasingly important.Meanwhile,writing evaluation could significantly influence the effectiveness of English writing instruction.However,evaluation methods adopted by teachers were mainly result-oriented.Traditional evaluation only assessed students' present abilities,and it neglected the evaluation of their potentials.In order to conduct writing evaluation efficiently,the concept of Dynamic Assessment(DA)was introduced in the field of second language evaluation.Based on the concept of Zone of Proximal Development(ZPD),DA combined teaching and evaluation,aiming to predict students' future potentials.Based on the DA model of foreign language writing(Kong Wen,2013),the present study explored the influence of interventionist DA on writing quality and that on students' transfer abilities;meanwhile,differences and similarities between interventionist DA and traditional evaluation with regard to improving writing quality were demonstrated.The research questions of the present study were as follows:(1)Could interventionist DA improve the quality of writings significantly?(2)What were the similarities and differences between traditional evaluation and interventionist DA with regard to improving the quality of writings?(3)Did interventionist DA have positive influence on students' transfer ability1 and was there any difference between interventionist DA and traditional evaluation in this aspect?Both quantitative and qualitative methods were utilized to conduct this empirical study of interventionist DA,which involved 45 students in the experimental group and 45 students in the control group,and the study lasted for 60 days.The present study adopted the measure of lexical complexity and syntactic complexity to analyze all the writings involved.The former consisted of lexical sophistication?(LS1),lexical density(LD)and lexical variation(LV);and the latter included mean length of clause(MLC),complex nominal per clause(CN/C)and the ratio of clause to T-unit(C/T).Web-based L2 Lexical Complexity Analyzer and Web-based L2 Syntactical Complexity Analyzer were used respectively to analyze the lexical complexity and the syntactic complexity of writings.What's more,the author utilized Ant Word Profiler1.4.0 to analyze the vocabulary and word frequency of writings.According to the results and discussion,three conclusions were listed as follows:(1)Interventionist DA could improve the LS1,MLC,CN/C and C/T of writings significantly.But the LD of writings decreased obviously.In addition,after the mediation of interventionist DA,there were some obvious improvements of students' writings with regard to vocabulary and word frequency.First,the word type of the 1st1000 word list2 increased significantly;the vocabulary of the 2nd 1000 word list3 rose up obviously;the vocabulary as well as the word type of the word list beyond 20004 also went up significantly.(2)According to the comparison between interventionist DA and traditional evaluation,it was found that interventionist DA was significantly superior to traditional evaluation with regard to improving the LS1 and C/T of writings;however,in terms of the improvement of LD,LV,MLC and CN/C of writings,there was no significant difference between interventionist DA and traditional evaluation.Plus,traditional evaluation could significantly improve CN/C of writings,which was the same as the effectiveness of interventionist DA in this aspect.(3)Interventionist DA had significant positive influence on students' transfer ability in the respect of LV,MLC and CN/C;however,there was no significant difference between interventionist DA and traditional evaluation in terms of improving students' transfer ability.As for improving students' transfer ability,the effectiveness of traditional evaluation was equivalent to that of interventionist DA.