Cultivating Iranian EFL learners’ grammatical knowledge through online cumulative group-dynamic assessment

While considerable empirical findings lend support to the efficacy of group-dynamic assessment (G-DA), grounded in Vygotsky's concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), in fostering English as a foreign language (EFL) learning in conventional classroom settings, the effectiveness of cumulative G-DA, (a version of G-DA) in online contexts has largely remained underexplored. To address this lacuna, this study investigated the effects of online cumulative G-DA on cultivating pre-intermediate EFL learners' grammatical knowledge (GK) among Iranian EFL learners. A cohort of 75 EF L learners, initially homogenized using a key English test (KET), were selected and randomly assigned to either an experimental group (n = 22) or a control group (n = 25). They went through a structured procedure including a pre-test, a treatment phase lasting 16 1-h sessions, a post-test, and a delayed post-test. The results of a repeated-measures ANCOVA revealed that the experimental group outperformed the control group on the post-test in terms of gains in GK. Furthermore, the results demonstrated a statistically significant difference between the two groups in terms of GK gains on the delayed post-test. The findings indicate that online cumulative G-DA can be considered an efficient alternative teaching practice for promoting EFL learners' GK. The study concludes by offering a range of theoretical and pedagogical implications for different stakeholders in EFL education.