Understanding language diagnosis as developmentally-mediated activity through Dynamic Assessment

Framed within a Cultural-historical approach to Second Language development (SCT-L2) (Lantolf, Poehner & Swain, 2018), this proposal explores the role of Dynamic Assessment (DA) in the diagnosis and promotion of conceptual categories (i.e. aspect) in novice learners of L2 Spanish situated in a K-12 context. While Diagnostic language assessment (DLA) has traditionally focused on assessing learners’ strengths and weaknesses (Alderson, 2005) in their previous learning to provide information for future learning (Kunan & Jang, 2011), DA goes a step further by providing targeted mediation during the process of evaluation with the goal of diagnose learner’s current development as well as promoting future development. Diagnosis, in this sense, is not interpreted in the basis of what a learner can do independently, but also with the assistance of their teachers, peers, and other semiotic artifacts. In this sense, learners become “critical agents of assessment” (Jang, 2012; Anton 2015). Using a clinical analytic approach based on Vygotsky’s (1978) genetic method, this presentation intends to explore the implementation of an interactionist Dynamic Assessment model aimed at diagnosing and promoting the development of preterit/imperfect tenses in novice learners of L2 Spanish (n= 26) enrolled in a novice L2 Spanish K-12 context. Participants’ emerging L2 conceptual development is informed by multiple sets of developmental data, including definition, performance (written narrations), verbalization, and personal reflection data collected in the context of two dyadic interactionist DA sessions. This presentation proposes that targeted mediation offered during DA, not only allows teachers to observe the whole picture of learners’ development, but it promotes critical development of a more sophisticated semantic understanding of the grammatical concept of aspect. Preliminary findings show evidence of participants’ ability to conceptualize grammatical concepts during DA, suggesting that this can be an effective tool diagnose and promote and L2 conceptual development in K-12 settings.