Enhancing EFL Learners’ Reading Proficiency through Dynamic Assessment

ABSTRACT

Built on Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory, Dynamic Assessment (DA) integrates teaching and assessment through mediator-learner interactions to promote learner development. This study employed interactionist DA to diagnose Chinese university EFL learners’ reading difficulties and promote their reading proficiency in a seven-week study. The design included a pre-test, a four-week Enrichment Program, a post-test, and a transfer test. Five learners completed each test both in a non-dynamic (NDA) and DA form. The learners’ individual interactions with a mediator in DA were recorded, transcribed and analyzed via Nvivo. In addition, the learners’ independent performances (IPs) on the NDA and DA, difficulties encountered in the process, the mediator’s prompts provided for the learners, and the learners’ mediated performances (MPs) were all identified and analyzed. Comparisons of the learners’ IPs and MPs across the tests showed that DA contributed to learners’ reading proficiency development, and this progress was evident both in their post-test IPs and MPs.

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the participants for their contribution and cooperation in the present study. We would also like to acknowledge the professional support from Mathew Poehner and James Lantolf, Guest Editors of this special issue, Gary Ockey, LAQ Co-Editor, and the anonymous reviewers, whose perceptive comments have improved the quality of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The full score is 150, 15 points for the listening and speaking test and 135 points for the reading and writing test.

² The first author joined the faculty of English Department in the university after she received her MA degree in linguistics and applied linguistics. During her study for her doctoral degree, she chose DA as her research topic under the supervision of the second author. She has since conducted a number of DA studies.

³ There were 7 passages in DA1, 8 in DA2, and 10 in TR. Since there were five students, the full number of the main ideas in the three tests should be 35, 40 and 50 respectively.

⁴ Unless provided by the student in the interaction, the mediator would ask about the answer to each item near the end of the interaction for a given item in order to determine whether the student had reached a full understanding of the item.

⁵ Since the frequency of use of the mediational moves for Category 2 was low, it was not taken into consideration for further analysis and discussion.

Additional information

Funding

This article was supported by Research Start-up Funds of Dongguan University of Technology.