An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Interventionist Dynamic Assessment On Junior High School Students’ English Reading Anxiety And Reading Performance

Dynamic assessment fits in with the current concept of integration of teaching,learning and assessment advocated by educational assessment and can,to a certain extent,effectively link student development of reading abilities with teaching and assessment.As one of the main forms of knowledge input,reading plays an important role in language learning.Foreign language learners are prone to reading anxiety,which in turn affects their reading performance.Based on Sociocultural Theory,Cognitive Modifiability Theory and Mediated Learning Experience,and the Affective Filter Hypothesis,this study explores the use of interventionist dynamic assessment in junior high school English reading teaching and its effects on junior high school students’ English reading anxiety and reading performance.Reading anxiety is approached in three main dimensions:comprehension anxiety,learning difficulties and reading confidence.Reading performance is explored in terms of three dimensions: summarizing main idea,guessing sense of words and reasoning in details.The thesis is structured around two research questions:(1)What are the effects of interventionist dynamic assessment on junior high school students’ English reading anxiety?(2)What are the impacts of interventionist dynamic assessment on junior high school students’ English reading performance?This study combines a quantitative and qualitative research method.Two parallel classes in the Grade 7 in a secondary school in Guangzhou were selected as the EC and the CC respectively to carry out the study.Before the experiment: interviews and daily teaching observations were conducted to get the students’ reading status.During the experiment: The EC used the dynamic assessment intervention of the "Graduated Prompting Method",while the control class used regular reading teaching and assessment.In post-test: EC and CC were compared to each other in terms of reading scores and anxiety scores between and within groups to verify the effectiveness of the dynamic assessment intervention.Finally,interviews were conducted to know changes in students’ reading anxiety and reading performance.SPSS 26.0 data analysis led to the following conclusions:(1)Interventionist dynamic assessment was effective in reducing reading anxiety and had a significant effect on reading learning difficulties and reading confidence degree.(2)Interventionist dynamic assessment can improve students’ reading performance,mainly in terms of their ability to summarize main ideas and guess the meaning of words.This study suggests that teachers should give students specific and targeted feedback during English reading instruction,and that the effective use of dynamic assessment can help to alleviate students’ reading anxiety and thus improve their reading performance.