Dynamic versus formative assessment (original) (raw)

Dynamism pumps the blood to the body of society; therefore, the dynamic and communicative nature of language can not only be considered integral in teaching, but also in assessing a language. Recently, all over the world traditional ways of assessment are trading place with more communicative ones. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate whether dynamic and formative assessment had significantly different impact on improving the listening skills of Iranian EFL Learners. To do so, 90 intermediate male and female learners from a language school in Tehran were elected. A piloted PET was administered as homogeneity test and 60 learners were selected as the participants and randomly assigned into two groups of thirty. To make sure that there is no statistically significant difference between the performances of the two groups in the beginning of the research a listening pretest of PET was administered in both experimental groups. In one group dynamic assessment, through teaching metacognitive strategies, was administered on learners' listening skills, while the other group's listening skill was assessed formatively. After fourteen sessions a posttest of PET was administered for both groups. The evaluation of the findings showed that the dynamically assessed group outperformed the formative one. © 2014 Elixir All rights reserved