Language Institute 2007-08 Lecture Series: Assessing Language Learning
Dynamic Assessment: The Dialectical Integration of Instruction and Assessment
James P. Lantolf
Pennsylvania State University
Note time change: 4:00 pm, Thursday, April 10, 2008
254 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Drive
Comments from Richard Young, Department of English
Abstract:
Dynamic Assessment is a pedagogical framework for integrating assessment and instruction into a seamless, dialectically unified activity that promotes learner development through appropriate forms of mediation that are responsive to the individual’s (or in some cases, a group’s) current abilities. DA promotes development through communicative interaction in a learner’s or learners’ Zone of Proximal Development, defined by L. S. Vygotsky as the difference between solo and mediated activity. DA, as called for in Vygotsky’s ZPD, assessment and instruction are dialectically integrated as the means to move toward an always emergent (i.e., dynamic) future. To paraphrase one of Vygotsky’s most influential colleagues, A. N. Leontiev, the goal of DA is not to discover what students are capable of (as in traditional testing) but to help them achieve what they are yet capable of. The lecture will present data from a number of studies recently completed on DA and L2 development and will address the following topics: Theoretical foundations of DA and the relevance of dialectics; Comparison of DA to traditional assessment; Different approaches to DA: intervention vs. interaction; Transcendence (moving to the future). The presentation concludes with a video from Lantolf and Poehner’s Dynamic Assessment: A Teachers Guide (CALPER Publication, 2007) that illustrates DA in action.
All lectures in the series are free and open to the public. Sponsored by the Language Institute, with funding from the College of Letters and Science Anonymous Fund.
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