Promoting Learners’ Willingness to Participate in Classroom Activities: Interventionist or Interactionist Dynamic Assessment?

Sanaeifar, S. H., & Salimi Arshad, S. F. (2023)

Abstract:

A lucrative classroom atmosphere develops by complete engagement between teachers, students, and learning tasks and activities. This study aims to investigate the effect of interventionist and interactionist dynamic assessment (DA) on promoting learners’ willingness to participate in classroom activities (WTPCA). In this study, 28 intermediate Iranian EFL learners participated and were randomly classified into interventionist and interactionist groups - 14 learners in each group. For evaluating their willingness to participate in classroom activities level before the instructional phase, we distributed the WTPCA questionnaire among the participants as a pre-test. In the instructional phase, the interventionist group was exposed to the interventionist DA approach while in the interactionist DA group, the researchers used the interactionist DA approach. For evaluating their WTPCA level after the instructional phase, we distributed the WTPCA questionnaire among the participants as a post-test. This study revealed that interventionist DA did not have a significant effect on promoting learners’ WTPCA, but the interactionist DA had a significant effect on promoting learners’ WTPCA. The findings of the present study have some pedagogical implications that may help English language teachers, EFL learners, language curriculum program policymakers, and syllabus designers.