Dynamic Assessment Of Listening Comprehension Of Chinese EFL Learners

Grounded in Vygotsky's concept of the Zone of Proximal development (ZPD), Dynamic Assessment (DA), which brings assessment and instruction into an organic unity, has been proven to be a useful diagnostic tool in psychological research and educational research that focused on teaching/learning different school subjects. Recent L2 research have also argued DA turns out to be effective in assessing and instructing L2 reading and writing. However, there is few research that examine the application of DA in L2 listening, let alone EFL listening. Existing studies on listening comprehension mainly focus on the product of listening, therefore, there is an acute need of introducing diagnostic tests which will identify problem areas to listening assessments and thus inform the instructional process. The thesis extends traditional understanding of listening assessment in foreign language contexts and applies DA to the development of learners'listening ability. It examined the effects of DA in improving listening comprehension of EFL learners and diagnosing their problems in listening comprehension.The present study investigated the effectiveness of DA in improving listening comprehension. The study lasted for one-and-half month and adopted a pretest-treatment-posttest design. It took twelve English major freshmen from the same listening class as participants. The participants were divided into experiment group and control group. During the experiment, each participant in the experiment group participated in four one-on-one tutoring sessions besides the usual classroom teaching, which intended to promote their listening comprehension and diagnose their problems by adopting dynamic assessment. The effectiveness of DA was manifested through an analysis of learners'performance and typological mediational and responsive moves that adapted from Poehner (2005) and Ableeva (2010) in DAs both quantitatively and qualitatively.The results indicate that DA is effective in promoting EFL learners'listening comprehension. Meanwhile, it can diagnose learners'listening problems in phonological, lexical, syntactic and discourse level. Through providing mediation sensitive to learners'ZPD, learners could improve to a large extent.