Minoo Alemi - Islamic Azad University, Tehran-west Branch

The rise of sociocultural theory has pushed up the value of dynamic assessment as one of the alternatives to traditional testing. The purpose of this study was to investigate (a) Iranian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners’ self-assessment and self-rating of their writing ability and the effect of dynamic-assessment-based course on their accuracy, and (b) the interrelationships among teacher rating, self-assessment, and self-rating in the writing performance of twenty two engineering students taking a writing course as part of a general English course. Conducting descriptive statistics, correlational analyses, and t-tests revealed that the participants overrated their writing ability as measured against teacher rating before their exposure to the dynamic-assessment-based course. While they got close to each other after dynamic assessment and high correlations among all participants’ self-rating, self-assessment, and teacher ratings proved the impact of dynamic assessment. The results suggest that dynamic assessment could help Iranian EFL learners to get a better awareness of their criteria for writing evaluation, and subsequently they become more accurate in assessing their own writing ability, and this is a step forward in education.

Dynamic assessment, Self-assessment, self-rating, teacher rating, EFL writing, self-rating criteria