The utility of tailor-made teacher education in Iranian EFL instructors’ attitudes towards dynamic assessment

Recent research has focused on language assessment as an alternative to traditional testing procedures due mainly to its congruence with communicative approaches to language teaching. This focus has resulted in the development of dynamic assessment that underlines the mediational role of instructor feedback in learners’ interlanguage development. To the best of our knowledge, few teacher education studies have dealt with this approach to assessment in different language contexts. Consequently, this study strived to determine the role of dynamic-assessment-informed teacher education in English as Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ attitudes towards this assessment procedure in their classes. Accordingly, the researchers selected 58 EFL teachers as the participants at 5 language institutes using convenience sampling. Moreover, they provided the selected participants with 12-session dynamic assessment-informed teacher education that equally focused on its interventionist and interactionist approaches. The participants were informed that they needed to implement these procedures in their classes subsequent to their education course. In the course of the following semester, the researchers observed the selected teachers’ classes and provided them with formative feedback on their dynamic assessment implementation. After the relevant semester, the researchers conducted 30-min interviews with the participants to determine their attitudes towards dynamic assessment. Based on the results of thematic analysis, EFL teachers had positive attitudes towards dynamic assessment efficacy in their classes. Nonetheless, they considered the practical issues of its implementation as major challenges to their language instruction. The study discusses the implications of the findings for different stakeholders.