Employing Tasks to Improve Argumentative Essay Writing of EFL Teachers: A Case of Interactionist versus Interventionist Dynamic Assessment

Dynamic Assessment (DA), which stems from Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, invests in the mediation of teacher to improve learners’ Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). This study investigated the impact of DA on the development of argumentative essay writing of EFL teachers and consisted of a pretest, mediation, a post-test, and a transcendence test (TRT). Accordingly, 66 novice EFL teachers were selected based on convenience sampling and were randomly assigned to two experimental groups and a control group (n1=n2=n3=22). The interactionist DA group (IA-DAG) and the interventionist DA group (IV-DAG) received non-standardized and standardized feedback types, respectively. However, the control group practiced non-DA writing instruction. Subsequently, a series of writing tasks were used for teaching writing. After nine sessions, the groups took a post-test, and after two weeks, TRT was administered. Appropriately, several statistical procedures were conducted to analyze data. First, repeated-measure ANOVAs were performed to examine the beneficial effects of the instructions in the groups. Second, the mixed between-within-subjects ANOVA was run and the results revealed that there were main effects for treatment types and time. Also, the result of one-way ANOVA on the post-test showed the outperformance of the IA-DAG over the other groups. Besides, the results of the one-way ANOVA on the TRT indicated no significant differences between the IA-DAG and IV-DAG. However, both groups had significantly higher mean scores than the non-DA group. The study has implications for L2 writing teachers, material developers, and educators.