An Empirical Study On The Application Of Dynamic Assessment To English Writing Teaching In Senior High Schools

This paper mainly conducts an empirical study on the application of dynamic assessment to English writing teaching in senor high schools.It aims at verifying the effectiveness and feasibility of dynamic assessment to promote students’ English writing proficiency.It seems that English writing teaching in senior high schools has been dominated by summative tests for so long.Although this assessment is quite efficient,it is not conducive to the benign development of students’ English writing proficiency based only on its content,mechanical criteria and prominent characteristics,which overemphasizes results in the long term.Dynamic assessment highlights the combination of teaching and assessment,which is beneficial to stimulate students’ potential,arouse initiative as well as enhance their Zones of Proximal Development through teacher-student collaboration.Ultimately,students will attain sustainable development with their writing competence.The thesis is based on Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory,especially the concept of “Zone of Proximal Development” and Feuerstein’s Mediated Learning Experience Theory.It applies dynamic assessment to senior high school English writing teaching,attempting to answer the following three questions:1)What is the students’ attitude towards dynamic assessment?2)What are the effects of dynamic assessment on students’ English writing strategies?3)What are the effects of dynamic assessment on students’ English writing proficiency?The present study is conducted to address the above research questions through a three-month teaching practice in a high school in Zhongshan,Guangdong Province.Before teaching,two parallel classes are selected regarding as the experimental class(EC)and control class(CC).EC carries out dynamic assessment writing teaching while CC adopts the traditional product-oriented teaching.Firstly,writing strategy questionnaires are conducted before and after the experiment to analyze students’ writing strategies.Then a comparison is made between writing scores of EC and CC after the experiment.Furthermore,the study compares the writing scores from four dimensions,namely,writing length,writing content,linguistic expression and contextual structure in terms of dynamic writing scoring criteria.It aims to explore the effects of dynamic assessment on students’ writing proficiency.Finally,after the experiment,questionnaires are implemented to get to know students’ attitude towards dynamic assessment.Research results indicate that: 1)students are satisfied with dynamic assessment and hold a positive attitude;2)dynamic assessment is conduciveto improving students’ writing strategies,especially to observably improving students’ meta-cognitive strategies,cognitive strategies,socio-affective strategies and organizational strategies.3)participants in EC have markedly promoted their writing proficiency in contrast with the subjects in CC.It is obvious that dynamic assessment is beneficial to promote students’ overall writing proficiency,especially on the promotion of writing length,writing content and linguistic expression.In a specific way,the writing length is significantly increased,the writing content is richer and the linguistic expression is more accurate,whereas the improvement of the contextual structure is not obvious.The thesis is simply a preliminary practice of the application of dynamic assessment to English writing teaching in senior high schools.Owing to the constraints of the author’s own theoretical attainment and some other objective factors,the experiment inevitably has some limitations.Currently,there are not sufficient applied research on dynamic assessment in China,so the follow-up research still needs to be continued.