An Action Research On Application Of Dynamic Assessment To English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

At present,the teaching methods of English writing in secondary schools in China usually uses the product-based approach and teachers tend to give summative feedback.Therefore,assessment of English writing is essentially static.Static assessment focuses on learning goals rather than students’ dynamic learning processes,which results in a lack of understanding of students’ cognitive development and insufficient intervention,especially teachers’ feedback.Focus on assessing students’ development and growth,regularly reflecting on and altering teaching behaviors during the teaching process,and focusing on students’ engagement in the classroom are all recommendations made in The General Senior High English Curriculum Standards(2017 Edition).As a result,in response to the new standard’s requirements and the flaws identified by static assessment,it is necessary to introduce dynamic assessment in senior high school writing teaching methods.Based on Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory and Feuerstein’s structural cognitive modifiability theory,dynamic assessment emphasizes the integration of teaching and evaluation,and explores the development of learners’ potential in the ZPD through teacher-student interaction as well as peers intervention.This has become a hot topic in the field of educational measurement in recent years and is of great importance to the reform of the English assessment process.Although some scholars applied dynamic assessment to second language teaching in 2008,there are few cases of action research being implemented in high school English writing classrooms in China.The researcher collected the current problems in high school English writing through a questionnaire and summarized the framework of dynamic assessment teaching in high school writing teaching based on the literature reviews.This was done by selecting 112 students from two senior classes with comparable English proficiency at M school in Sichuan Province as the subjects to conduct an action research.The study was conducted in two rounds,following the basic process of planning,implementing,observing,and reflecting for four months,which focused on exploring the effects of DA-based high school English writing teaching on students’ writing scores and writing performance in terms of writing accuracy,fluency and complexity.The data collected from the questionnaire and students’ writing papers were analyzed by the software SPSS in order to detect changes in students’ English writing scores and writing performance before and after the study.The results of the study showed that the DA-based English writing teaching framework was effective in improving students’ English writing scores and writing performance in terms of accuracy and fluency,however,had little effect on the complexity of writing.This study not only enriches the action research on DA-based high school English writing classrooms but also provides new perspectives and methods for English writing teaching assessment in high school.