Exploring the Role of Dynamic Assessment in Language Education: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

This special issue, ‘Exploring the Role of Dynamic Assessment in Language Education’, began to take shape at a colloquium of the same name at the 2016 Georgetown University Roundtable (GURT). That particular edition of GURT was organized by the Assessment and Evaluation Language Resource Center (AELRC) at Georgetown and was aptly titled Useful Assessment and Evaluation in Language Education. The purpose of our colloquium was to present and compare four novel approaches to Dynamic Assessment (DA) that would provide a richer understanding of how DA for L2 development had evolved over the years. Indeed, dynamic assessment, one of the main applications of Vygotsky’s (1987) notion of Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) applied to the teaching-learning-assessment dialectic, has been increasingly regarded as a fundamental construct in L2 education (Lantolf and Poehner, 2014). Framed within a Vygotskian sociocultural perspective, DA integrates instruction and assessment with the goal of ascertaining and promoting L2 development, placing the learner at the center of the teaching/learning activity. This is precisely one of the key elements of useful approaches to assessment and evaluation, ‘a comprehensive approach to education that is accountable to the needs of learners, the values of scholarly disciplines, and the well-being of society’ (Davis, 2018: vii). That is, rather than focusing on placement, diagnostic, achievement or other accountability measures, useful methods of assessment are transformative approaches that intend to provide a better understanding