This case study analyzes the developmental trajectories of two L2 learners through dynamic assessment (DA) of academic writing. The study investigates how DA yielded a diagnosis of learner emerging writing abilities, how this diagnosis informed an instructional enrichment program, and the effectiveness of that program in promoting learner writing development.
This qualitative case study reports data drawn from a larger research project that investigates the potential of dynamic assessment (DA) in diagnosing and promoting L2 English learners' academic writing development. Grounded in Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory (SCT) and its concept of Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) (Vygotsky, 1978), DA conceives of instruction as dialectically integrated with assessment, such that the former is required for a diagnosis of the full range of abilities. The presentation focuses on the developmental trajectories of two learners with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds recruited from the same L2 academic writing program at a large U.S. university. The study included four stages: Time 1 DA that yielded a diagnosis of learner writing abilities; a five-week instructional enrichment program tailored to the diagnoses of individual learners; Time 2 DA that paralleled the Time 1 DA phase of the study but included a different writing topic; and a nondynamic transfer assessment which intended to ascertain the learners' success in transferring their writing abilities to a more challenging task. In both the Time 1 and Time 2 assessments, the learners first composed an argumentative essay independently in response to a reading-writing integrated task, followed by an interactionist DA session where the mediator and learner jointly reviewed the essay with reference to an analytic rubric (Weigle, 2004) before learners finally revised their essay independently. Data analysis examines the two learners with regard to (a) their writing abilities as revealed by their initial drafts composed during the Time 1 assessments, and (b) instances of microgenetic development that occurred in the first DA session. The learners' writing developmental trajectories, analyzed through the textual changes in the essays composed during the study, are then compared. Examining the learners' performance at the Time 2 DA phase and transfer assessment, the study concludes by discussing the effectiveness of the ZPD-attuned enrichment program that was informed by the learners' diagnostic profiles obtained through the Time 1 DA procedure.
