Employing Dynamic Assessment and Concept-based Instruction for the Development of English Phrasal verbs in an EFL Classroom

Abstract

Established on the basis of Vygotsky's SCT, this study tends to document the EFL students' development of phrasal verbs through two SCT-oriented approaches including concept-based instruction (CBI) and dynamic assessment (DA). Moreover, the students' performance in the follow-up stage is explored to see whether they experience a conceptual development in a new context. Participants were 45 pre-intermediate and intermediate high school students who were randomly assigned into two experimental groups and one control group. The study followed a mixed-methods procedure employing both experimental design and qualitative case study. To examine the appropriateness of the instruments and tasks, initially a pilot study was run in a one- to- one tutoring session. Subsequently, all groups were asked to go through the pretest followed by 10 sessions of instruction and posttest. Finally, DA and DA-CBI groups participated in a follow-up stage. ANOVA results on posttest showed the significant influence of integrating DA and CBI as a joint function on EFL students' conceptual development over the traditional control group, F (2, 42) = 14.27, p= .000