چكيده لاتين :
Pragmatics, which is one of the most eminent concepts in the world of
language learning and teaching, has established itself in various academic
fields. The teachability of pragmatics has been investigated in a plethora of
studies (Derakhshan & Shakki, 2020; Shakki et al., 2020), though scant
attention has been given to assessing and testing pragmatic features. It has
been a long time that practitioners and teachers use traditional assessment to
assess students, but with the emergence of new approaches in teaching, there
should be new ways to test and assess learners. The present study is
theoretically underpinned by Vygotsky’s (1978) Socio-Cultural Theory
(SCT), which postulates that a person’ cognition is mediated socially during
the interaction, and it emphasizes a mediated relationship not a direct
relationship which is the basis for Dynamic Assessment (DA). He believes
that the development of a child consists of two levels, namely actual level
and potential level of development. Activating the Zone of Proximal
Developmnet (ZPD), which is the distance between the actual developmental
level and the level of potential development, requires guidance and
collaboration. Since assessing the speech acts of apology and request
through DA has not been taken into account so far, the present study aimed
to find out the effects of DA on the acquisition of Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ speech act of apology and request. To this end, 66 students,
selected from Shokouh Language Institute in Kalaleh, Golestan Providence,
Iran, participated in this study.
Research Question:
Does dynamic vs. non-dynamic assessments (NDA) have any effect on
the acquisition of Iranian intermediate EFL learner’s speech act of apology
and request?
Three groups of language learners whose language proficiency was
determined by Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT), participated in the
present study. The total number of the participants was 85 Iranian learners,
from whom 66 were selected as intermediate level whose scores ranged from
24 to 30, according to OQPT. The gender of the students was both male and
female, and learners aged from 15 to 19. Their native language was Persian,
and they were studying English as a second language. After homogenizing
learners, they were divided into three groups, one DA, one NDA, and one
control group. Listening pragmatic comprehension test, devised and
validated by Birjandi and Derakhshan (2014), was utilized as the pretest and
posttest of the study. First, the participants were tested before the
intervention; after teaching speech acts to learners (30 apology and request
video vignettes that were taken from seasons and episodes of 13 Reasons Why
and Suits), the learners were tested by the listening pragmatic comprehension
test to compare the results. In this study, to have homogeneous learners for
all three groups, the mean and standard deviation of the proficiency test were
calculated. To answer the research question, the scores taken from pretest
and posttest were submitted to the Statistical Package of Social Sciences
(SPSS).
To find the effectiveness of the treatment, the means of control group,
NDA group, and DA group were compared. In order to make sure whether
or not the groups were statistically different, One-way ANOVA test and post
hoc test of Tukey were run. Based on the mean scores for the pretest in one
DA and two NDA groups, which are 58.88, 55.92, and 55.67, it is shown
that little difference exists among the three groups. However, in order to
make sure whether or not the groups are similar statistically, One-way
ANOVA test was conducted. The Sig. value is .92 which demonstrates that
since this is more than .05, it can be concluded that there is not a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the three groups. On the
other hand, the mean scores for the posttest in one DA, NDA, and control
group, respectively, were 117.42, 72.83, and 61.58, showing that the groups
are different. Furthermore, the Sig. value is 0.00, which is smaller than .05,
so this means that the intervention which was implemented in the DA group
was effective. Since the obtained value does not show where the significant
difference exists, post hoc test of Tukey was used to find the statistical
significance between the groups. The values corresponding with the
comparison between the DA group and NDA groups are smaller than .05.
For this reason, it can be concluded that the difference between DA
group and the other two groups is statistically significant. However, the
comparison between the two NDA groups revealed that they are not
significantly different from each other (p=.392>.05). The results of one-way
ANOVA test indicated that there were statistically meaningful differences
across groups, and the results of post hoc test of Tukey revealed that dynamic
group outperformed both non-dynamic and control groups, but no meaningful
difference was found between non-dynamic and control groups although nondynamic
had a better mean score compared to that of control group.
Considering the findings of the present study, it is suggested that harmonizing
the instruction and testing provides opportunities for the learners, and learning
should be individualized in order to have better outcomes. To put it in a
nutshell, giving students contextually appropriate input has been a pivotal
factor to increase learners’ pragmatic ability while understanding and
performing the speech acts. In light of the gained results, the present study
offers some implications for teachers, learners, and materials developers. It is
suggested that teachers apply DA in their language classrooms to maximize
interaction, mediation, and negotiation.
