| Poehner (2008) suggested that “in educational contexts, assessment--understandinglearners’ abilities--and instruction--supporting learner development--are a dialecticallyintegrated activity. This pedagogical approach has come to be known as DynamicAssessment”(DA). Dynamic Assessment is no longer a new approach in fields ofpsychology and education. In fact, some of its current applications have been around for morethan a half century. In2010, Hou and Liu (2011) described about700literature citationsrelating to dynamic assessment that were listed at the website www.dynamicassessment.com.The majority of those are of recent date, suggesting a rapid growth of interest in this topic inthe last10to15years. However, language educators have only recently begun to examine thepedagogical applications of DA in an L2context (e.g. Schneider and Ganschow,2000;Kozulin and Garb,2002; Lantolf&Poehner2004; Poehner2005; Antón,2003,2009;Ableeva,2008). Those researchers explored the interventionist DA researches or one to oneinteractionist DA researches. The interventionist DA can not report the detail information ofDA procedure to the teacher, assessor and mediator. And the mere one to one interactionistDA typically can not adapt to the whole classroom interactive teaching in second languageclassrooms. This thesis explores interactionist Group Dynamic Assessment–the use ofinteractionist DA with groups of classroom L2learners rather than individuals–which hasbeen suggested by Poehner (2009). Group-based and one-to-one DA procedures follow thesame general principle of offering learners mediation to help them co-construct a ZPD, butthey differ in that G-DA must also take account of the group’s ZPD. For G-DA to effectivelypromote the development of all group members, the teacher must actively engage the entiregroup in G-DA interactions.This study sought to explore the application of G-DA to a FL learning context. Itemphasized the interactionist G-DA on oral narrative.58students majoring in ComputerScience of Shandong Agricultural University were recruited for the research.4students ofthem took part in one-to-one interaction in the mediation process. The whole procedure of theresearch included three stages:1. the pre-test;2. the mediation process stage and3. thepost-test. Each assessment session was recorded, transcribed and analyzed. The transcripts were coded and analyzed in order to determine whether the structure and the content aresuitable for the oral narratives or not, and cases of learners’ self-regulating and whether theywere successful.The results and the discussions have explored changes between NDA1and NDA2interms of participants’ actual level of development, as evidenced by their independentperformance. Additionally, it also analyzed the mediator’s interactions with the four learnersthat focused largely on the unity, cohesion/coherence, focuses and evaluation through whichtheir potential future development emerged. Findings from the research show that (1)interactionist G-DA can be arranged as a framework for the classroom to promote learners’oral narrative ability;(2) the collaborations between the mediator and participants duringG-DA provided additional information about their abilities. On the basis of these findings,some reasonable suggestions are put forward for EFL teaching in China.On theoretical level, this study has provided an empirical case of DA and G-DA, andcontributed to domestic EFL research; on practical level this study has offered implication forhow to make use of DA to develop individual’s ability in a more effective way and utilizeG-DA to promote the whole class development more efficiently.. |
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