Investigating Effect Of The Application Of Dynamic Assessment To Retelling On Reading Teaching

In recent decades,there has been dramatically increasing research with regard to retelling strategy.It was found from Wanfang Data that there were 25 studies on the retelling strategy in 2005 while there were 166 research involved in 2017.Retelling strategy has been used in English teaching for several decades since Brown & Cambourne(1987).Many studies have shown that this strategy can promote students' learning of vocabulary,speaking,writing as well as reading.It is also considered to be able to improve students' capacity in thinking.However,some of studies showed retelling strategy used in the class currently was still not efficient enough.Retelling in the class currently was monotonous because of little mediation from teachers(Liao Min 2012),and students were little confident as a result of their low quality retelling products.Appropriate mediation in accordance with students' Zone of Proximal Development is necessary yet addressed by very few researchers.To fill such research gap,the present thesis extends the using of retelling strategies to adding the dynamic assessment to retelling process.It investigates the effect of application of dynamic assessment to retelling strategy on reading teaching.Combining quantitative and qualitative methods,it attempts to answer the following questions: 1)What is the effect of applying the dynamic assessment to retelling strategy on reading comprehension of junior middle students;2)What is the effect of applying the dynamic assessment to retelling strategy on the learners' performance of retelling in terms of use of newly-learnt vocabulary and clause;3)What are the attitude of the students as regards application of dynamic assessment to retelling and retelling strategy?The study was set in a middle school in Fuzhou of Jiangxi province and it selected two natural classes as the research subjects,one class being the experimental class and the other the controlled class.Before the experiment,the reading scores of the two classes were collected from their first examination in that term as pre-test data.According to the pre-test in reading,there was no significant difference between the experimental class and the controlled class(Sig.=.312).In the midst of experiment,students in the experimental class received reading teaching in which dynamic assessment was applied to the retelling process.However,in the controlled class,students received reading teaching in which retelling strategy was utilizd.After the experiment,participants in both groups received the questionnaire about their attitude towards the retelling strategy and students in experimental class received an additional questionnaire towards their attitude towards the dynamic assessment.The data of the study consisted of the following three parts: 1)pre-test and post-test reading scores of students from both classes;2)students' retelling tasks,including the frequency of students' use of newly-learnt vocabulary and clause;3)students' questionnaire responses as regards their attitude to application of dynamic assessment to retelling and the retelling strategy.SPSS was adopted to analyze all the collected data.Statistical methods included Independent Sample Test,Wilcoxon W and Descriptive analysis.Data analysis of the current study uncovered that the application of dynamic assessment to retelling can improve students' reading grades,and at the same time receiving students' acceptance.Additionally,the frequency of students' use of newly-learnt vocabulary(Sig.=.002)and clause(Sig.=.008)increased significantly in the experimental class as a result of the application of the dynamic assessment to the retelling strategyDespite what the study needs to do for further exploration of the impact of dynamic assessment,it throws some light on how teachers can assist learners in developing abilities to retell passages and read more effectively.