Dynamic Speaking Assessments

by Mehran Sabet and Kent Hill

This presentation reports on the efforts of the Seigakuin English Program to improve their first-year university speaking assessments by applying dynamic assessment (DA) techniques. The central feature that distinguishes DA from non-dynamic is that DA does not separate instruction from assessment (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006). DA is not a standalone activity carried out in isolation from other pedagogical activities. It is instead an on-going, development-oriented process of collaborative engagement that reveals the underlying causes of learners' performance problems and helps learners overcome those problems (Poehner, 2007). The particular forms of DA in this study are mediated assistance and transfer of learning. The year-long longitudinal classroom-based research involved four speaking DAs. The content validity of DA was also analyzed by applying a multi-faceted quantitative analysis (i.e., the Rasch Model) to qualitative data (i.e., oral assessment transcriptions). Results showed significant improvement in performance, indicating that DA is beneficial to oral assessment performance.