DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT, A VERSATILE TOOL FOR TEACHING AND ASSESSING CRITICAL READING

This study presents Dynamic Assessment (Henceforth DA) as a way of mixing assessment and instruction. For this purpose, a number of reading strategies were applied to the reading course of ten EFL students studying in a language school. The strategies were incorporated in the reading course through DA and assessed via the same method. The data collection procedure was conducted through "University of Florida Critical Thinking Inventory Manual", "Observation logs" and "New tasks". Question one of the study dealt with awareness of students; for this question two types of data were gathered; quantitative data were gathered via EMI and qualitative data via descriptive records in teaching logs which showed an increase in students' awareness to CT. The aim of the second question was to prove that students have acquired these core CT skills and can apply them to analyzing unseen texts. Therefore, two new tasks, similar in length and level of difficulty but different in content, were designed and implemented, one at the beginning of the program and the other one at a fairly long interval after mediation. Results showed that DA had a significant effect on their ability to transfer the core critical thinking skills to unseen situations and critically read a text