Mahnoosh Homavandi - Department of English Language and Literature, Yazd University, Yazd, Iran
Mohammad Javad Rezai - Department of English Language and Literature, Yazd University, Yazd, Iran
Golnar Mazdayasna - Department of English Language and Literature, Yazd University, Yazd, Iran

Morphological awareness, refers to the ability to reflect upon and manipulate morphemes and morphological structure of words (Carlisle, 2003). The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of dynamic assessment on EFL learners’ reading comprehension. A secondary aim of the study was to examine which method of assessing morphological knowledge could predict and account for the EFL learners’ reading ability to a larger extent. To fulfill these aims, 50 intermediate EFL learners were divided into experimental and control groups. The abilities of 25 EFL learners in the experimental group were assessed using a dynamic assessment procedure following Larson and Nippold (2007). The results indicated that dynamic assessment of morphology improved EFL learners’ reading comprehension. Furthermore, the dynamic assessment task could predict EFL learners’ reading comprehension over and above the static assessment task of morphology. The findings provided preliminary support for the usefulness of a dynamic assessment of morphological awareness within an EFL context. The study also found that morphological awareness as measured by the dynamic assessment made a significant contribution to the prediction of reading proficiency for intermediate EFL learners. Replication of this study with a larger sample size is warranted and may yield more generalizable results in support of using a DA to assess morphological awareness in the EFL context.

Morphological Awareness, Dynamic Assessment, Reading Comprehension, EFL learners