Dynamic Assessment of L2 Listening Comprehension in Transcendence Tasks

L2 assessment researcher have long been preoccupied with the question of whether the learners can reapply their newly gained abilities in the non-assessment contexts, a concept traditionally known as generalizability (Bachman, 2004; Cronbach, 1990; Messick, 1995; Poehner, 2008) The present study was designed to flesh out the concept of generalizability from a qualitatively different perspective, namely, Vygotsky's (1978) Socio-cultural Theory (SCT) of Mind under a new framework known as transcendence (TR) (Poehner, 2010). This study, inspired by Poehner's (2009) interactionist group dynamic assessment G-DA, and Feuerstein et al.'s (1976) Mediated Learning Experience (MLE) concept, has set out to track the developmental trajectories of L2 learners' listening comprehension ability within a microgenetic framework in hopes to bring into perspective learners' qualitative changes during the interaction and mediation collaboratively negotiated in their ZPD across a set of different innovative tasks. The data for this G-DA study were collected from the classroom context (Poehner, 2009). The results, including both the quantitative and qualitative, indicated that non-dynamic assessment (NDA) procedure stops short of fully capturing the learners' underlying potential and leaves aside the abilities which are in the state of ripening. It was shown that the learners' ability to recognize an unrecognized word of the pretest transcended beyond the posttest task to the TR session, an improvement signaling their progressive trajectories towards higher levels of ZPD. On implication side, the paper recommends the use of DA as a development-oriented procedure to assess the learners' abilities, a procedure which focuses on the learners' emerging abilities in constantly innovative tasks. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.