The Effect Of Dynamic Assessment On English Reading Abilities In Junior High School

In China,teachers have assessed students’ reading ability and level mainly through static assessment,which focuses on students learning results and therefore neglects students’ learning process,which,to some extent,impedes the development of students’ learning potential.What’s more,static assessment cannot meet the special learning needs of junior high school,resulting in their weaknesses in English reading ability.Therefore,the present studies,based on the researches home and abroad,aim to explore the dynamic assessment teaching model that is consistent with the characteristics of English reading in order to improve the traditional static assessment.This thesis is an empirical study based on a review of previous research on dynamic assessment.It is designed to answer the following questions: 1)can dynamic assessment improve students’ reading ability more effectively than static assessment? 2)is dynamic assessment helpful in changing the students’ attitudes towards reading?The researcher of this study did an experiment on 90 junior middle school students in Qin’an County,Gansu Province,with 45 students from experimental class(EC)with dynamic assessment in English reading teaching and the other 45 students from controlled class(CC).Both classes are general classes.One was the EC while the other was the CC.On the basis of literature review,the author integrated the advantages of dynamic assessment models abroad,taking into consideration the characteristics of junior middle school students.The study lasted for 8 weeks,adopted “pre-test” – mediation– “post-test” procedure.The process of the experiment was divided into three periods: 1)the first period is the preparation for the experiment,including pre-test to both the two classes and pre-questionnaire and structured-interview towards the experiment class.2)the second period is the stage of eight-week’s teaching experiment.Dynamic assessment was applied to the experimental class while the control class was taught through traditional method-grammar translation.In CC,there were three steps to access.At first,students were given a static English reading test.Secondly,the teacher mediated students by hints from implicit to explicit that were planned in advance.At last,students were asked to take a static test.After each assessment,the teacher required students to write a journal to record how much they had mastered.3)after the experiment,the post-test was conducted on the students in both the experimental class and the control class,and the students in the experimental class were arranged to do the post-questionnaire and post-interview.All results were analyzed by SPSS Version 22.0.Through data collection and analyses,the conclusions of the study are as follows: 1)Dynamic assessment can improve the reading ability for most students.In addition,the students make obvious progress in main idea questions and inference questions.2)Dynamic assessment can cultivate students’ interest and awareness of using reading strategies.Meanwhile,the results showed that interventionist dynamic assessment which used interactive and face to face mediated training can predict students’ ZPD of English reading ability.And compared with traditional static assessment,students prefer dynamic assessment to static assessment.