Tracing the Group of Students ZPD in Cohesion and Formality from Socio-cultural Perspective

Dynamic assessment (DA) is the amalgamation of instruction and assessment for the purpose of enhancing learners developmental ability (Poehner, 2008). Although dynamic assessment is well-known for its dyadic form such as mediator-learner model, few studies in the field of dynamic assessment trace students developmental ability with a group of student. Following the sociocultural perspective, the present study addresses the way Group Dynamic Assessment (G- DA) implemented practically in the foreign language classroom with the aim of diagnosing and mediating a group of learners Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) in following writing domains: a) cohesion (subject-verb omission, subject-verb agreement, repetition, linker, wordiness, collocation and parallelism), and b) formality(vocabulary, structure, paragraph writing, contractions, personal pronoun and wordiness). The participants of this study were 9 female intermediate learners from Mehr institute in Babol, Iran. As a conventional cognitive modification methodology, Best s (2006, p. 224) model known as A-B-A single subject design which incorporated of A (the pretest), B (mediation) and A (posttest) is employed to attest the learners writing development. Building on Socio Cultural Theory (SCT), a wide range of mediation, based on were offered to the learners based on Sternberg and Grigorenko s (2002) cake format in order to move the groups forward in its ZPD. Drawing on Aljaafreh and Lantolf (1994), the mediations were proposed in a hierarchical order from the most implicit to the most explicit in order to move the groups towards independency. The qualitative analysis of the GDA protocols disclosed the fact that by providing mediations to a group of learners, the learners moved from other-regulation to self-regulation and a group of learners ZPD is constructed. Quantitative comparison between the pretest and the posttest revealed the progress of the groups ZPD in cohesion and formality areas in writing.

کلیدواژه ها:

dynamic assessment (DA) ، group dynamic assessment (GDA) ، zone of proximal development (ZPD) ، formality ، cohesion