THE APPLICATION OF DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT REGARDING TO THE ACQUISITION OF APOLOGY SPEECH ACT BY IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS

Dynamic Assessment, as a new type of language testing, should be combined with different areas of pragmatics. To investigate the application of DA regarding to the acquisition of apology speech act, 143 intermediate Iranian learners from a language institute in Isfahan, Iran were selected randomly and assigned to two Dynamic Assessment and Traditional Assessment groups based on their scores in Oxford Quick Placement Test. Each group participated in a pretest, a posttest and 6 treatment sessions consisted of 6 Discourse Completion Tests. Both groups received a thirty-minute instruction of apology strategies, according to Olshtain and Cohen's (1983) model, after pretest. During the treatment sessions, DA group received mediation, if they answered incorrectly, based on Lantolf and Pehner's (2011) scale; but the basis for TA was independent performance. Paired sample t-test was used to analyze the data for both groups. The findings of this study showed that DA group outperformed TA in the acquisition of apology speech act. Moreover, the learners in DA group became more independent at the end of the course. This study shed some light to the assessment of pragmatics. The results of this area will hopefully contribute the teachers to provide EFL learners with the most fruitful mediation and might help them to produce and understand the apologies properly in different situations.