The Effect of Interventionist Classroom vs.MALL Dynamic Assessment on EFL Learners’ Vocabulary Learning

At the level of research, assessment and instruction have evolved/ developed as separate specializations with their own conventions and techniques, e.g., expert diaries and gatherings (Pohner 2005). One of the areas which recently have been advancing more dynamically in applied linguistics is MALL. It has been considered a means of developing various language skills and sub-skills (Marandi, 2011). Therefore, the present study tried to merge these two important issues by exploring the effect of interventionist classroom dynamic assessment and MALL on EFL learners’ vocabulary learning. For this purpose, initially, a PET (2015) was administered to 130 EFL students, 90 of whose scores were between one standard deviation above and below the mean score. First, vocabulary knowledge test was administered as a pre-test to check students’ vocabulary knowledge. The participants were then divided into two experimental and one control groups, each experimental group received treatment in a specific type of classroom setting and MALL. In the control group, the participants learnt 40 lexical items/words in a traditional manner, whereas in the classroom dynamic assessment and MALL dynamic assessment groups, the participants received DA strategies feedback on 3 vocabulary tests throughout the semester, however, the way they were treated in these two groups varied. After the treatment, VKS was administered as the posttest. The results of a repeated-measures two-way ANOVA showed that there was a significant improvement in all the three groups. More specifically, the findings showed that although the classroom dynamic assessment group outperformed the other two groups in the posttest, the difference was significant only between the classroom dynamic assessment and control group. Conclusions and pedagogical implications are discussed towards the end of the paper.