The Effect of Dynamic Assessment on Iranian IELTS Students' Metacognitive Awareness for Reading Strategy and Reading Development

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of dynamic assessment (DA) on reading comprehension development and metacognitive awareness for reading strategies of Iranian IELTS students within the framework of Poehner (2008) who advocated the integration of assessment and instruction in promoting learners' abilities. It was a pretest-treatment-posttest quasi-experimental design in which 71 men and women advanced EFL learners participated. The experimental group (n=35) received DA interventions for the period of 10 weeks (40 hours in total) and the control group (n=36) went through regular teaching methods and static assessment. Two academic IELTS reading comprehension equivalent tests were employed as the pretest and posttest. Also, the metacognitive awareness for reading strategy questionnaire of Mokhtari and Richard (2002) was administered twice (once at the outset and once at the end of the study). The results of an ANCOVA analysis showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in reading comprehension development. Moreover, a statistically significant difference was found between the metacognitive awareness for reading strategies of the experimental group and that of the control group through the repeated measure AVONA test. Regarding the results, this study recommends teachers and IELTS instructors to consider DA in their test preparation programs.

Keywords:Interventionist dynamic assessment; zone of proximal development; static assessment; reading comprehension.

DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/79-02

Publication date:May 31^st 2021