Mediating Multilingual Immigrant Learners’ L2 Writing Through Interactive Dynamic Assessment

Abstract

Learning-oriented assessment approaches, such as Dynamic Assessment (DA), have recently grabbed increasing attention, and appeared as an alternative by embedding instruction into the assessment. During DA, teachers actively intervene in the assessment process, tailor mediational moves to learners’ ever-shifting needs and diagnose their microgenetic growth. Grounded in the dialogic reciprocal teacher-learner interaction during an in tandem work, DA asserts that diagnosing the learners’ matured abilities and needs, mediating accordingly, and then observing their maturing abilities are crucial. This assertion paves the way to reveal each learner’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). Despite some influential studies on the use of DA in language education, more studies are warranted to explore the use of DA in different contexts and with different participants. Therefore, this case study recruited two multilingual immigrants/refugees who were underachievers in L2 writing classes. They were provided individual interactive DA for ten weeks, and the dialogic interaction between the teacher and the students was analyzed. The data were also compared to their writing test scores in three different periods. The results revealed that initially, the mediational moves mostly rested on teacher-agency, but over time more learner-agency-oriented mediational moves were also adopted. Furthermore, these students started to narrow the gap between themselves and their classmates. Lastly, a semi-structured interview was conducted to illustrate the participants’ perspectives towards DA in the L2 writing context, and the related data revealed recurrent themes that had bidirectional relation with DA’s theoretical premises.