Dynamic Assessment

Abstract

One of the important skills every EFL learner should be good at is reading comprehension. Consequently, how it is taught and assessed becomes an important task for teachers to ensure the learners’ progress on this skill. Out of the different types of assessment, dynamic assessment is gaining more attention nowadays. Therefore, this study tried to examine the effect of using dynamic assessment on EFL learners’ performance on selective and productive reading comprehension tasks as two important types of tasks. To begin the study, a Nelson test at the intermediate level was used; based on their performance on this test, 60 female EFL learners were chosen out of an initial sample of 117 and then they were randomly divided into two control

Introduction

Dynamic assessment which is the main focus of the present paper is a type of assessment defined as a process of active intervention of the teacher and constant assessment of the students’ responses to intervention. There is a continuous interaction between the teacher and the student containing non-stop instructions, leading questions, and responses (Haywood & Lidz, 2007).
It is a sort of interactive assessment conducted by the developmental psychologist, Vygotsky which is mostly used in education. He believed in interactions which are cooperative and interpersonal. This approach to L2 assessment has first been introduced by Poehner and Lantolf (2005).
On the other hand, regarding reading, Horner (1998) and Kern (1989) believed that it is a demanding work in all the languages. The readers have to coordinate several things some of which are attention, memory, perceptual processes, and comprehension processes, that is, they must work at several layers at the same time. These several layers are to decipher and establish meaning simultaneously as they reply to what they are reading, and so many other things. This is even harder in second language

In educational settings, this theory’s goal is to understand the way instruction influences development and the kind of instruction which might promote development. The key concept in Vygotsky’s theory is the zone of proximal development (ZPD), which Vygotsky, himself, defined it as the gap between the present level of each individual’s ability in problem-solving and the ability to do so with the guidance of a mediator, that is, the extent to which a learner can perform in the case of having an assistance that cannot do without it (Poehner,