An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Dynamic Assessment On English Public Speaking Competence Of English Majors

Assessment is not only the main means to evaluate classroom teaching, but also an important method to guarantee teaching effectiveness and promote students’potential learning competence. For many years, teaching assessment focused too much on the summative assessment that stresses the result while neglecting the process, which to a certain extent, hindered students from developing their potential learning ability. Dynamic assessment is a new means of intelligence evaluation that rose in the Western countries two or three decades ago. Based on a developmental view of intelligence, this assessment aims to evaluate the learning potential of the participants and promote a change of their cognitive mechanism."Process orientation" and "integration of mediation and assessment" are the two features of dynamic assessment. Researches of dynamic assessment in the field of psychology and general education have been fruitful, while at present the western SLA researchers have just stepped into this domain. However, in China, the studies on dynamic assessment in foreign language education are limited to the teaching of English writing.With references to previous researches of dynamic assessment abroad and at home, this study aims to design a dynamic assessment framework for English public speaking competence of English majors and explore the effects of dynamic assessment on nurturing English majors’public speaking competence. So, the study was designed to answer the following two questions:(l).What are the effects of DA on English public speaking competence of English majors?(2). What are the students’attitudes towards DA in the course of English public speaking?This empirical study was carried out with both qualitative and quantitative methods. The subjects of the study were67Junior English majors at Southwest Petroleum University, who were divided into two groups according to their major concentration:one was the controlled class (hereafter CC), and the other the experimental class (hereafter EC). And all the data for analysis mainly came from the teaching experiment, questionnaires and interviews. In the part of analysis and discussion, the study would analyze the results of qualitative and quantitative studies from the perspective of message composition, message delivery and additional public speaking competence, with qualitative results integrated into the quantitative part as the illustrations to reveal whether there was a statistic significant difference in public speaking competence between the experimental class and the controlled class after the teaching experiment, so as to testify and explain the impact of dynamic assessment on English majors’public speaking competence. The results showed that application of dynamic assessment had a positive effect on improving English majors’public speaking competence by facilitating ability in speech drafting and adopting effective public speaking strategies, and relieving students’public speaking anxiety. During the experiment, students developed positive attitudes toward dynamic assessment in the course of English public speaking, indicating it rewarding to apply dynamic assessment into the teaching of English public speaking.Finally, based on this study as well as the limitation, the thesis put forward some implications about how to imply the dynamic assessment to improve English majors’public speaking competence and suggestions for the further research.