The impact of the implementation of dynamic assessment in raising students' metasyntactic awareness

Dynamic Assessment is an alternative way of testing students' abilities in language. Taking its roots from L.S Vygotsky's socio-cultural theory of cognitive development, the instruction and the assessment are unified in Dynamic Assessment. As Luria (1979) state that this unification of assessment and unification takes its roots from Vygotsky's understanding of development. Dynamic Assessment allows students to be a part of their learning process and also it allows teachers to gain insights into students' cognitive abilities. Students gain a kind of control over their mental abilities through being a part of their learning process. In terms of teachers, as they gain insight into students' learning process, Dynamic Assessment provides them to give feedback or prepare new materials in accordance with students' needs. Through Dynamic Assessment students' awareness towards language can be raised. One of them is the metasyntactic awareness. Therefore, this study, offering an alternative way of testing students' metasyntactic abilities, was conducted to observe the impact of the implementation of Dynamic Assessment in raising students' metasyntactic awareness. Quizzes, assessment tasks, reflective questionnaire, researcher journal, interview and tabulation of scores were used to collect data. Also the transcriptions of the mediation processes were used. The results of the study showed that the implementation of Dynamic Assessment had positive effects on raising students' metasyntactic awareness.