Abstract
This chapter presents the theoretical background of dynamic assessment (DA) and its praxis with pedagogical suggestions for foreign language writing instructional settings. Resting on Vygotsky's sociocultural theory (1978), DA asserts that there is a need for blending instruction with assessment because of the social interaction's salience on cognition modification. Thus, DA adopts learning-and-learner-based feedback approaches and a present-to-future model of assessment, which rests on reciprocal teacher-learner interaction. Grounding in the need for enlightening DA in an EFL setting, this chapter presents reciprocal interactions between a teacher and four students. The interaction analyses unveil that the teacher has adopted a variety of mediational moves to finely instruct the students and diagnose their microgenesis, and students have displayed various reciprocity acts towards the mediational moves provided to them, which unpacks each student's zone of proximal development. Based on these findings, the chapter ends with suggestions for EFL writing teachers.
TopIntroduction
People come from different socio-cultural backgrounds, and their interactions with society may show differences, which directly affects each person’s opportunity to reach qualified education and information. Today students, especially those who are at the tertiary level, are getting mobilized around the world, so students whose socio-cultural and educational backgrounds are diverse might also influence classrooms’ dynamics (Shrestha, 2020). Even though the diversity inside the classrooms may be an advantage, it may also create some pitfalls. For example, in second/foreign language learning settings, adopting the same corrective feedback approach for all learners may not work effectively (Storch, 2018), and administering merely a past-to-present assessment model may not unpack each student’s ability to achieve something (Poehner & Lantolf, 2013). Moreover, countries’ different education policies during the pandemic and evolving digital technologies have ignited gaps among students (OECD, 2020; Shrestha, 2020).
These factors have led to a call for finding new instructional and assessment approaches and highlighted the salience of dialogic interaction, individual learners’ needs, and learning-based assessment approaches (Poehner & Inbar-Lourie, 2020). Grounding in this necessity, Dynamic Assessment (henceforth DA) has appeared as an alternative approach, and this chapter aims to report on DA, which is a learning-oriented assessment approach and relies on learners’ needs (Poehner, 2008). DA’s theoretical orientations are grounded in Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory (SCT) (Vygotsky, 1978) and Feuerstein’s Mediated Learning Experience (MLE) (Feuerstein et al., 2010), and DA moots that social milieu and social interaction have a salient impact on people’s cognition modification. That is, people’s innate abilities and people’s direct exposure to any stimuli may not be enough to unpack their exact potential to achieve something because social interaction leads people to think in new ways and modify their higher-order cognitive skills (Haywood & Tzuriel, 2002; Vygotsky, 1978). Within this nature, parents, teachers, and more-able peers have salient roles in children’s and students’ lives since they can support the learning process by mediating input (Feuerstein et al., 2010).
In a broad view, Dynamic Assessment refers to the fusion of instruction and assessment in a single collaborative work between teachers and students (Poehner, 2008). Its instructional dimension relies on SCT-oriented feedback approaches (Aljaafreh & Lantolf, 1994). Although both language teachers and SLA (Second Language Acquisition) researchers have long been interested in how to deal with learners’ errors effectively and suggested a variety of feedback approaches to provide qualified input for the learners (Hyland & Hyland, 2006), the best one could not be decided yet because of learner differences, learners’ various needs, and different error natures (Mao & Lee, 2021; Nassaji, 2017; Storch, 2018). Regarding the need for increasing the effectiveness of feedback, negotiation on learner errors has recently been gaining importance (Erlam et al., 2013; Nassaji, 2017) since negotiation between two parties, such as teachers and students, paves the way to discuss, find a solution, and mitigate misunderstanding. This leads to a decrease in the gap between interlanguage and target language (Nassaji, 2016, 2017). Said another way, the salience of negotiation lies at the heart of dialogic reciprocal interaction and tailoring feedback according to each learner’s needs to provide qualified input through graduated feedback (Aljaafreh & Lantolf, 1994; Nassaji & Swain, 2000).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Transcendence: It refers to the learners’ transfer abilities of mediational tools to new tasks.
Regulation: It is broadly divided into object-regulation, other-regulation, and self-regulation. During dynamic assessment sessions, mediators observe a learner’s regulatory level after providing mediational tools to unveil whether s/he needs assistance (other regulation) or regulate the task alone (self-regulation).
Mediation: It covers a goal-oriented interaction between learners and teachers/mediators.
Zone of Actual Development: An individual’s independent problem-solving skills.
Zone of Proximal Development: The distance between what an individual can achieve alone and what s/he can achieve under a mediator’s assistance.
Dynamic Assessment: It is a kind of learning-oriented assessment approaches and integrates instruction and assessment in a single and collaborative work between learners and mediators.
Sociocultural Theory: Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory highlights the salience of social interaction on individuals’ cognitive development.