An Investigation into the Effect of Interactionist versus Interventionist Models of Dynamic Assessment on General Language Ability Performance of Persian EFL Students

One of the newly-utilized approaches in language testing and assessment is dynamic assessment with its two main procedures: interventionist and interactionist procedures. The prime intent of the present study was to investigate the effectiveness of the two above-cited procedures of Dynamic Assessment on general language ability performance of Persian EFL students. Although DA has been applied to some areas of second language pedagogy, its effect on Language Ability Performance seems as if to be less attended to, hence the present study aims at investigating the effects of this assessment procedure on the General Language Ability Performance of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. To this end, 36 homogenous intermediate EFL learners were divided into three groups. They were assigned to two DA groups and one Non-DA group. As the pretest, the Top Notch placement test was run among the candidates Next, The first DA group s participants were assessed and given the required assistance through interaction based DA procedures, while the second DA group received DA based intervention following Lantolf and Poehner (2011) scale to assess the participants’ general language abiity performance. The results of two Matched Samples t-test indicated that:(a) interactionist model of DA had statistically significant positive effect on Iranian EFL learners’ gneral language ability performance; (b) interventionist model of DA had statistically significant positive effect on Iranian EFL learners’ gneral language ability performance. The findings of this study can shed light on the comparative efficacy or inefficiency of the DA based assessment procedures in the realm of foreign language teaching and testing.

کلیدواژه ها:

Dynamic Assessment ، Interventionist procedure ، Interactionist procedure ، Iranian EFL learners