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abstract |
This book explores the application of an innovative assessment approach known as Dynamic
Assessment (DA) to academic writing assessment, as developed within the Vygotskian
sociocultural theory of learning. DA blends instruction with assessment by targeting
and further developing students’ Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).
The book presents the application of DA to assessing academic writing by developing
a set of DA procedures for academic writing teachers. It further demonstrates the
application of Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), combined with DA,
to track undergraduate business management students’ academic writing and conceptual
development in distance education.
This work extends previous DA studies in three key ways: i) it explicitly focuses
on the construction of a macrogenre (whole text) as opposed to investigations of decontextualized
language fragments, ii) it offers the first in-depth application of the powerful SFL
tool to analyse students’ academic writing to track their academic writing trajectory
in DA research, and iii) it identifies a range of mediational strategies and consequently
expands Poehner’s (2005) framework of mediation typologies.
Dynamic Assessment of Students’ Academic Writing will be of great value to academic
writing researchers and teachers, language assessment researchers and postgraduate
students interested in academic writing, alternative assessment and formative feedback
in higher education. |