Group Dynamic Assessment Mediation for the L2 Classroom TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC MỞ BÀI GIẢNG GIÁO TRÌNH

Group Dynamic Assessment: Mediation for the L2 Classroom MATTHEW E POEHNER The Pennsylvania State University University Park, Pennsylvania, United States Dynamic assessment (DA) offers a conceptual framework for teaching and assessment according to which the goals of understanding individuals’ abilities and promoting their development are not only complementary but are in fact dialectically integrated More specifically, DA follows Vygotsky’s proposal of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) by offering learners external forms of mediation in order to help them perform beyond their current level of independent functioning (Vygotsky, 1986) A major challenge to implementing DA in second language (L2) classrooms is that these contexts typically not permit the one-to-one interactions that have characterized most DA work to date (and ZPD research more generally) This article explores the use of DA with groups of classroom L2 learners rather than individuals Group dynamic assessment (G-DA) applies the same principles of mediation as in individualized interactions but broadens the focus to potentially an entire class Vygotsky himself recognized the possibility of constructing a group ZPD by negotiating mediation with more than one individual (see Vygotsky, 1998) Transcriptions of G-DA interactions involving L2 classroom learners are presented It is argued that organizing classroom activity in this way enables teachers to explore and promote the group’s ZPD while also supporting the development of individual learners I n both general education and the second language (L2) teaching domain, there is renewed interest in relating assessment to teaching and learning, and it is within this context that dynamic assessment (DA) has begun to attract attention from researchers and practitioners DA differs sharply from most other forms of assessment in its basic premise that fully understanding abilities requires active intervention in their development and consequently shifting focus from products of prior learning to the processes through which abilities are formed At the level of practice, the more familiar assessment model in which teachers observe student performance is replaced by one in which teachers and students jointly carry out activities, with teachers intervening as necessary to help learners stretch beyond their current capabilities This mutual engagement functions simultaneously as instruction and assessment because teachers TESOL QUARTERLY Vol 43, No 3, September 2009 471 not only discover where learners encounter problems but they also provide support to overcome them BACKGROUND The theoretical basis for DA is found in the writings of the Russian psychologist L S Vygotsky, and particularly his conceptualization of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) Vygotsky held that humans, unlike other animals, interact with the world in a mediated rather than a direct manner, employing culturally specified symbolic tools such as signs, symbols, counting systems, and language to understand and transform the world through concrete activity Furthermore, social interactions play a leading role in our own development because cognition emerges through engagement with others One of the hallmarks of Vygotsky’s theory is his position that the mind is not contained within an individual’s head but includes interaction with others and the use of physical and symbolic artifacts This perspective is the basis for his well-known distinction between intermental and intramental functioning As Vygotsky argued, new cognitive functions appear twice during the course of their development, first on the intermental plane as individuals work collaboratively with others and with cultural artifacts and later on the intramental plane, when these functions have been internalized and may be carried out by the individual without external support (Vygotsky, 1978) Vygotsky argued that instruction should not target fully formed abilities but should operate within the ZPD to optimally guide learner development: Since teaching depends on immature, but maturing processes and the whole area of these processes is encompassed by the zone of proximal development of the child, the optimum time for teaching both the group and each individual child is established at each age by the zone of their proximal development (Vygotsky, 1998, p 204) In this way, the ZPD provides a theoretical framework for the integration of teaching and assessment: For teaching to be most effective, it must be attuned to the ZPD, which entails an assessment that provides mediation to help learners perform beyond their present capabilities; at the same time, this mediation constitutes teaching intended to support learners’ developing abilities As I have argued elsewhere (Poehner, 2007, 2008b), the ZPD demands a revolutionary pedagogy in which assessment and teaching are fused as a single, development-oriented activity This is precisely the aim of DA researchers, who have devised various approaches to co-constructing ZPDs with learners (see Lantolf & Poehner, 2004) Regardless of the specific approach followed, DA proponents have shown a strong preference for one-to-one, mediator–learner procedures 472 TESOL QUARTERLY Vygotsky (1998) describes the ZPD as “the optimum time for teaching both the group and each individual” (p 204), but he does not elaborate the group ZPD in his published work Since Vygotsky’s time, the numerous studies of learning and development that have invoked the ZPD have likewise favored a dyadic expert–novice or mediator–learner model The L2 DA has also favored a dyadic model (see, e.g., Poehner, 2008a, 2008b; Ableeva, 2008) Targeting the development of an individual no doubt appears a more manageable undertaking than mediating a group of learners, but in some ways it represents an unrealistic model for classroom teachers, who typically must engage classes of 15 to 30 learners (and in some cases many more) Although both general and L2 DA work have done much to offer teachers principles and models to consider, this matter of scale has not been adequately addressed The purpose of the present article is to outline how DA may be organized to function within a class’s ZPD In what follows, I argue that a major impediment to creating a classroom ZPD is that to date little serious work has been done to articulate a theory of group Indeed, it is widely held that groups may be formed by simply placing individuals together and assigning tasks to be performed, with little or no consideration given to whether such groups constitute socially coherent units This practice has become commonplace, not only in experimental psychological research but in various communicativeoriented language pedagogies (Brandl, 2007; Lee & VanPatten, 2003; Savignon, 2002) What is missing from such work is an articulation of the relationship between individual development and that of the group, conceived as a psychological entity in itself Without such an understanding, it is difficult to imagine how group activities may be organized to reveal individuals’ abilities and to support their continued development Even recent research in the area of cooperative learning, despite its connections to Vygotskian theory (e.g., McCafferty, Jacobs, & DaSilva Iddings, 2006), has largely overlooked the developmental dynamics of groups The same is true of models of group-based assessment (He & Dai, 2006; Hilsdon, 1995; Van Moere, 2007) As I will show, Vygotsky’s perspective on the social origins of mind, and in particular the extension of his theory to the study of group functioning by the Russian psychologist A V Petrovsky (1985), offers a powerful way of thinking about the interrelations between individual and group ZPDs that can guide the implementation of G-DA However, more needs to be said first about how individual–group relations have been traditionally understood Group and Individual As should be clear, Vygotsky assigned a leading role to the social world in psychological development As his close colleague A R Luria (1970) GROUP DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT: MEDIATION FOR THE L2 CLASSROOM 473 put it, it is through internalization of culturally specified forms of mediation that “the social nature of people comes to be their psychological nature as well” (p 45) For education, the interconnection between social activity and development of the mind implies that teaching need not wait for learner readiness but that it may take a leading role in helping learners chart new developmental trajectories Moving from a one-to-one model of teaching and assessment to a group-focused approach requires an understanding of the relation between development of individuals and development of the group In Vygotskian terms, this is the relation between the individual’s and the group’s ZPD Petrovsky (1985) explains three broad perspectives on individual and group abilities that have emerged in psychology The first, which I will call group-as-context, has dominated research in the West According to this view, the group itself is not psychological in its own right but simply serves as a static backdrop to the performance and development of the individual By limiting the definition of group to “a chance association of people with nothing connecting them except time and space” the group-as-context view ignores the question of group abilities (Petrovsky, 1985, p 66) The group is nothing more than an “aggregate of interrelated and interacting individuals” whose “purposeful activity” is unimportant for understanding individual cognitive processes (p 106) Petrovsky points out that, on this view, the group itself is regarded as a contextual variable that exercises a “mechanical influence” on the psychology of the individual, who remains the analytical focus (p 66) The group-as-context perspective clearly informs many current practices in group-based assessment, where every effort is made to parse out the performance of the individual to infer his or her underlying abilities as they are observed in the group setting For instance, Webb (1992) conducted a metastudy of group-based assessment procedures and concluded that although group assessments are a useful approach to evaluating learning, their results not provide an appropriate basis for making inferences about individuals’ abilities Instead, he argues, one must distinguish individuals’ abilities from what they are able to when working with others on the grounds that the group setting only obscures the true focus of assessment, the individual (see also Lejk, Wyvill, & Farrow, 1996) The other two approaches to relating individual and group abilities that Petrovsky describes both understand the group to have psychological status and stress the importance of the activity in which group members are engaged They differ concerning the degree of individual identification with the group Specifically, in a group-as-cooperation model, each individual retains his or her own goals while understanding their interrelation with the goals of other group members In a group-as-collective model, all are united in working toward a common goal Petrovksy explains that the group-as-collective model involves the most highly devel474 TESOL QUARTERLY oped form of social relations among individuals because it is guided by the humanistic principle “for others as for oneself” or “to oneself as to others” (Petrovsky, 1985, p 191) Drawing on his own clinical work, Petrovsky (1985) relates these forms of group to the shifting orientations of individuals participating in group therapy (pp 160–161) He notes that at the outset, participants understand the object of group therapy to be their own recovery; the group merely offers a context for interaction Group members view one another as merely chance associations As sessions progress, patients come to regard others as important for their own recovery That is, individuals are still each oriented toward overcoming their own problems but they now begin to value cooperation with others and the role others can play in facilitating their recovery In some instances, the groups eventually adopt a collective orientation, in which they not only see others as instrumental in their own recovery but the goal of the activity shifts from the individual to the group, and each works to bring about the recovery of every group member, an orientation Petrovsky captures with the axiom “The health of each is the wealth of all” (p 161) Group Activity The importance of both cooperative and collective activity for psychological development is that as individuals recognize the interdependence of their goals, “the specific character of the relations being formed [among group members] demands from each person involvement in joint intellectual activity, and the pooling of mental efforts in order to overcome difficulties” (Petrovsky, 1985, p 183, italics added) Petrovsky’s notions of joint activity and pooling efforts require some explanation Joint, in contrast to solo, activity denotes contributions from more than one individual to realize individual and group goals The initially competitive nature of social relations among group members gives way to cooperation as they come to understand their own development to be a function of the group’s activity, the success of which ultimately depends on each member’s contributions (pp 186–187) The shifting dynamics of individual relations and goals within the group transform the group into much more than an assemblage of individuals The group itself begins to function as a psychological entity composed of individuals with different forms of expertise working cooperatively to carry out activities that no single group member could independently To be sure, this way of thinking about group activity is markedly different from what one finds in many language classrooms, where group work is often construed as a time for learners to use the language with little regard for the object of their communication and its significance for development GROUP DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT: MEDIATION FOR THE L2 CLASSROOM 475 (see Magnan, 2008) For Petrovsky, group work is much more than an opportunity for communication—it is purposeful activity in which communication is crucial because it is the sharing of knowledge and abilities that moves the group forward in its ZPD while also benefiting individuals (Petrovsky, 1985, p 183) The changing nature of social relations and goals, then, implies that development of the group and development of the individual are increasingly interconnected Hutchins and Klausen (1996) offer an example of interconnected social relations and goals in their analysis of how a flight crew interacts while flying a commercial airliner According to these authors, “a larger unit of cognitive analysis” foregrounds not the actions of individual crew members but rather the coordinated efforts of the group, each with different expertise, as they fly the plane—something none could accomplish independent of the group (p 17).1 As instructive as this example may be, it is also the case, as Petrovsky (1985, pp 171–172) reminds us, that collectives emerge more readily during some activities than others For instance, the divisions of labor and different expertise that may be observed in the cockpit example are inherent in certain highly complex activities and essential to achieving desired outcomes (e.g., surgical procedures, industrial manufacturing), whereas other contexts, such as formal schooling, tend to favor individual achievement Petrovsky (1985) explains that “genuinely collective academic activity” is extremely difficult to realize in practice both because there is often no obvious division of labor (other than, say, teachers and students) and also because schooling culture “mainly envisages an individualized process of mastering knowledge” (p 181).2 However, Petrovsky does recognize collectives in school settings as a possibility and assigns primary responsibility to the teacher: “Correctly organized group work does not reject, but necessarily stipulates the leading role of the teacher” (p 186) Teachers take the leading role not because they can simply transform groups of learners into collectives Rather, by engaging learners in tasks that are challenging to all and providing support to benefit all, teachers may foster a more cohesive The Hutchins & Klausen (1996) example of cognition in an airline cockpit fits with models that have been broadly defined as distributed cognition (see, e.g., Salomon, 1993) Research on distributed cognition emphasizes the importance of a strict division of labor with contributions made according to individuals’ previously developed forms of expertise In this regard, labor activities would appear to differ markedly from educational contexts, where the object is not simply to contribute based on prior learning but to develop new abilities through collaboration This would most likely be achieved through shifting roles and responsibilities among group members rather than through a static division of labor Donato (1994) provides an example of what he argues is a collective orientation among university undergraduate French L2 learners engaged in group work He notes that one group’s cohesion became apparent in their discourse (e.g., a prevalence of “we” rather than “I” and “you” as they addressed one another) as well as in the ease with which they changed roles, and the lack of overt turn-taking markers (p 40) However, this orientation appears not to have been the result of teacher intervention but emerged on its own 476 TESOL QUARTERLY orientation to classroom activities on the part of students, an orientation in which learners share a common goal of solving the problems at hand and appreciate the contributions of others for the realization of both this common goal as well as more individualistic goals, such as demonstrating proficiency to earn grades Put another way, by organizing instructional activities around the group’s ZPD, teachers may help the group itself to become psychological in the sense that the development of the group and the individual are interrelated In G-DA, as I show in the next section, two approaches have emerged to bring about such group cohesion GROUP DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT Group-based and one-to-one DA procedures follow the same general principle of offering learners mediation to help them co-construct a ZPD, but they differ in that that G-DA must also take account of the group’s ZPD As explained earlier, G-DA entails understanding the group to be not merely a context for individual performance but a social system in its own right that might be supported to function in ways that are beyond the present capabilities of any individual member G-DA then must engage the group in an activity that no individual is able to complete independently but for which all members require mediation, albeit at different levels and different quantity Of course, the forms of mediation needed will likely vary from learner to learner at any given point in time Bearing in mind the notion of a shifting focus of instruction, teachers may find it useful to track development of the individual’s ZPD within the broader group ZPD by foregrounding the support offered to an individual within the group and to examine his or her responsiveness However, for G-DA to effectively promote the development of all group members, the teacher must actively engage the entire group in G-DA interactions Of course, engaging the entire group does not mean that the teacher should not offer mediation to individuals, but that every mediating move should also be directed to the group In this regard, it is useful to distinguish primary from secondary interactants in G-DA In the event that the teacher offers mediation in response to a given learner’s difficulty, that learner and the teacher are the primary interactants as they negotiate the support that is needed However, because the exchange occurs in the social space of the class and before the other group members, it has mediating potential for the rest of the group as well, who are secondary interactants but participants nonetheless Similarly, the teacher may pose a leading question or provide a prompt to the entire group to which individual learners will respond Once again, the respondents may engage more overtly with the teacher but the exchange may simultaneously benefit secondary interactants, a notion substantiated by research on private speech in language classrooms (Lantolf & Yáñez-Prieto, 2003; Ohta, 2001) GROUP DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT: MEDIATION FOR THE L2 CLASSROOM 477 In what follows, I offer examples of two different approaches to G-DA with L2 learners In the first, which I refer to as concurrent G-DA, the teacher dialogues with the entire group To be sure, the teacher may provide mediation in response to an individual, but the interaction shifts rapidly between primary and secondary interactants as one learner’s question, struggle, or comment sets the stage for another’s contribution In this way, concurrent G-DA may appear to an observer to be similar to whole class instruction, but of course the absence of extended one-onone interactions does not preclude development within individuals’ ZPDs In the second approach, cumulative G-DA, the teacher conducts a series of one-on-one DA interactions as the group works toward mastery of a problem That is, individuals take turns engaging directly as primary interactants with the teacher, with the understanding that each subsequent one-on-one exchange will have the advantage of building on earlier interactions that the class witnessed This approach is cumulative in that the goal is to move the entire group forward in its ZPD through negotiations with individual learners in their respective ZPDs Cumulative G-DA attempts to move the group forward through co-constructing ZPDs with individuals, but concurrent G-DA supports the development of each individual by working within the group’s ZPD The following discussion offers a brief illustration of concurrent G-DA with L2 learners and then moves to a more extended discussion of L2 cumulative G-DA The reader should not interpret the relative length of discussion to mean that cumulative G-DA is more effective or somehow preferable to concurrent G-DA Rather, it reflects the recent emergence of cumulative G-DA research—at the time of writing, ongoing projects have yielded more developed examples of cumulative than concurrent G-DA.3 For the purpose of illustration, I will briefly comment on Gibbons (2003), which describes a classroom teacher’s efforts to scaffold a group of English language learners I will limit my remarks to explicating how I believe the teacher co-constructs a group ZPD with her students (for further discussion, see Lantolf & Poehner, 2004) Concurrent G-DA with English Language Learners in an Australian Primary School Setting Gibbons (2003) describes a primary school class of English language learners who are attempting to gain control over appropriate scientific terminology to discuss the outcomes of their laboratory experiences 478 The interested reader may also wish to consult the ongoing work of Hamp-Lyons, Davison, and colleagues under the rubric interactive assessment, which shares DA’s commitment to providing support during procedures including those in group contexts TESOL QUARTERLY In one particular lesson, the class worked in groups to conduct an experiment on magnetism and then convened as a class to relate their observations and inferences As learners describe their experiments, the teacher offers mediating support that increases in explicitness with each move, as in DA What is important is that the teacher does not run through the full range of mediating prompts with a single learner before beginning again with another individual Instead, the teacher’s focus remains fixed on the entire class, and although he may call on a particular student to answer a question or may address an individual learner at a given point in time, his next remark will be directed to another learner and will build on the preceding contribution In this way, the teacher engages the class in the activity of using scientific terms to talk about magnetism and offers mediation intended to benefit all As mentioned, the primary and secondary interactants during such an exchange are in a constant state of flux To appreciate how this type of interaction unfolds, consider the two following brief exchanges reported by Gibbons (2003, p 264) and discussed by Lantolf and Poehner (2004, pp 64–65) These exchanges occurred consecutively during the same lesson In the first, the teacher (T) elicits a response from Beatrice (B) and in the second from Michelle (M) Note how the progression from implicit to explicit mediation from the teacher continues across the two exchanges rather than within them separately: Exchange 1 T: Tell us what happened B: Em we put three magnets together/it still wouldn’t hold the gold nail T: Can you explain that again? B: We/we tried to put three magnets together to hold the gold nail even though we had three magnets it wouldn’t stick At this point, the teacher turns to another learner nearby: Exchange T: Tell us what you found out M: We found out that the south and the south don’t like to stick together T: Now let’s/let’s start using our scientific language Michelle M: The north and the south repelled each other and the south and the south also repelled each other but when we put the/when we put the two magnets in a different way they/they attracted each other As Lantolf and Poehner point out, the prompt given to Beatrice to attempt the explanation again is far less explicit than the one give to GROUP DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT: MEDIATION FOR THE L2 CLASSROOM 479 Michelle, which directs her to use scientific language In fact, the teacher’s prompt to Beatrice does not even state that there is a problem with her description whereas the prompt to Michelle reveals the nature of the problem Viewed as two distinct interactions, one might conclude that Beatrice was disadvantaged and the teacher was more favorable to Michelle by taking a more leading role in guiding her development However, shifting the analytical focus from the individual to the group allows a very different picture to emerge From this perspective, the prompts to Beatrice and Michelle are alternating turns in a dialogue that the teacher negotiates with the entire class, a dialogue in which mediation is continually fine tuned to remain in step with the learners’ level of responsiveness Of course, this dialogue might be interpreted simply as an example of good teaching; indeed, Gibbons does not refer to DA but understands the exchanges as teaching-focused interactions that take account of the ZPD Recall, however, that Vygotsky’s formulation of the ZPD posits a dialectical relation between teaching and assessment Offering learners mediation, as the teacher does in these examples, serves simultaneous teaching and assessment functions, a diagnosis of abilities that are still in the process of forming as well as an intervention to support their development Given that these interactions occur within a group, it is also worth noting that Michelle’s success in arriving at an appropriate response does not necessarily indicate that she is at a higher level of development than Beatrice Although she may be, it is also possible that she is more responsive because, unlike Beatrice, who only received one mediating prompt, Michelle stood to benefit from two—one directed to her and one directed to Beatrice The question, which we are unable to answer definitively, is what impact the prompt directed to Beatrice had on Michelle’s performance The matter of secondary interactants benefitting from mediation offered to a primary interactant is equally important for cumulative G-DA and is taken up in the next section Cumulative G-DA with Spanish Language Learners in a U.S Primary School Setting Lantolf and Poehner (in press) report the results of a study of DA principles implemented in the context of a laboratory primary school affiliated with a major urban university in the northeastern United States.4 The school employs a full-time L2 Spanish teacher, Tracy (a pseudonym), 480 This research was funded by a grant from the United States Department of Education (CFDA 84.229, P229A020010-03) However, neither the arguments presented here nor the contents of Lantolf and Poehner’s (in press) paper necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and one should not assume endorsement by the United States government TESOL QUARTERLY who visits each class of students daily for 15-minute minilessons The examples that follow (reported by Lantolf & Poehner, in press) are from Tracy’s interactions with a class of fourth grade students aged 9–10 years Tracy had organized a unit around Peru that introduced the children to a number of cultural topics as well as to a range of relevant lexical items The grammatical focus of the unit concerned marking substantivemodifier concord, a traditionally difficult concept for English-speaking learners of Romance languages to master In the following examples, the class is playing a game that involves rolling a cube, each side of which contains a picture of an animal indigenous to Peru The students must then use the vocabulary they have studied to describe the animal Students volunteer one at a time to go to the front of the class, roll the cube, and describe the animal while the rest of the children watch Tracy is also positioned at the front of the class and intervenes to offer mediation when students experience problems Tracy had studied a DA manual designed specifically for language teachers (Lantolf & Poehner, 2006) She implemented these principles according to her own interpretation of DA, and discussed each week’s lessons in advance with the authors of the DA manual to refine her ideas All lessons were video recorded for further analysis (see Lantolf & Poehner, in press) Given her understanding of the ZPD as well as her knowledge of the instructional context, Tracy determined that the most effective way to conduct DA with her students was through an approach in which she hierarchically ranked prefabricated mediating prompts from most implicit to most explicit and assigned a numerical value to each The precise content of the prompts was tailored to meet the demands of the task and therefore varied somewhat from lesson to lesson, but they were typically organized so that the implicit end of the scale alerted learners that there was a problem and provided hints as to its nature, and the explicit end guided learners to correcting the problem, with the most explicit prompts requiring the teacher to provide the solution and explain it The following is the inventory of prompts Tracy designed to accompany the lesson under analysis: Pause Repeat the whole phrase questioningly Repeat just the part of the sentence with the error Teacher asks, “What is wrong with that sentence?” Teacher points out the incorrect word Teacher asks either/or question (negros o negras?) Teacher identifies the correct answer Teacher explains why GROUP DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT: MEDIATION FOR THE L2 CLASSROOM 481 TABLE Sample Group DA Mediation Chart Name GABRIELA MANUEL VICENTE ROBERTO AMORA RAQUEL Interaction Interaction Interaction Comments dos ala gris dos orejas cafe dos ojos negros Given Tracy’s preference to conduct DA through individual interactions during whole-class activities, her approach may be considered an example of cumulative G-DA While teaching, she carried a clipboard containing a chart that included each child’s name alongside several columns where she recorded the level of mediation offered to individual learners throughout a given lesson These charts provided space for multiple interactions with each learner as well as a column to add comments concerning the nature of the problems, students’ responsiveness to support, and other observations An example of such a chart that captures the interactions reported is presented in Table For Tracy, the benefits of this system were threefold First, the charts enabled her to quickly produce a record of each of her interactions with the students without interrupting the flow of the lesson Second, the charts provided documentation of individuals’ (and the class’s) changing needs and abilities This overview of development facilitated Tracy’s planning of subsequent lessons because she had a grounded point of departure to rely on rather than her mere recollections Third, and perhaps most important, the charts could be viewed sequentially enabling Tracy to track individual and class development over time by discerning changes in the level of support students needed as well as how they performed when more difficult tasks were introduced.5 In the following interaction, Tracy (T) is helping Vicente (V), a learner who has rolled the cube and must describe a lechuza (owl) The rest of the class watches as Vicente attempts to say that la lechuza tiene dos orejas cafés (the owl has two brown ears): Exchange T: Vamos a describir so tell me tiene la lechuza tiene cuatro (pause) ¿entiendes? 482 Understanding learners’ performance when tasks are rendered more challenging is important to interpreting their development and within DA is described as transcendence (see Poehner, 2007) TESOL QUARTERLY We’re going to describe so tell me the owl has has four you understand? V: cuatro (pause) tiene orejas four (pause) it has ears T: ¿Cuántas orejas? how many ears? V: tiene dos orejas it has two ears (long pause, points at the image on the cube, then looks at the teacher) *café *brown (looks out to the class, then back to the teacher) *café *brown (then looks back at the cube) T: ¿Tiene dos oreja * café? it has two *brown ears? V: (looks at the cube again and points at it twice with his finger) sí dos orejas (pause) *café yes two *brown ears T: ¿*Café? *brown? V: ¿Amarillo? yellow? T: ‘Café’ es correcto pero ¿dos orejas café? ‘brown’ is correct but two brown ears? 10 V: (no response, turns his body to face the class, looks at cube then out at class and back to cube) (murmuring from another student off camera) 11 T: shhh (directed to the student) 12 T: Hay un problema (pause) la palabra ‘café’ there is a problem (pause) with the word ‘brown’ (no response from Vicente but a girl in the class says “oh” and raises her hand) 13 T: (looks to the girl and then back to Vicente) ¿Es *café o cafés? Is it *brown or brown? 14 V: Cafés Brown 15 T: Sí muy bien tiene dos orejas cafés muy bien excelente Vicente Yes very good it has two brown ears very good excellent Vicente Initially, Tracy appears to be drawing Vicente’s attention to another of the owl’s features as she points out that it has four of something, which she leaves unspecified In line 2, Vicente selects the owl’s ears to GROUP DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT: MEDIATION FOR THE L2 CLASSROOM 483 describe, and when asked in line how many, he responds that it has two brown ears (line 4) He stresses the number two (dos) and then looks to the cube, the teacher, and the class as he works through selecting the modifier café (brown) Although café is indeed the color of the owl’s ears, the adjective must be marked for plurality through the suffix -s In line 5, Tracy repeats Vicente’s utterance with a rising intonation in order to determine whether this is sufficient for the learner to recognize and correct the mistake Vicente remains committed to his original formulation, and refers to the cube again, pointing twice to the owl’s image (perhaps once to each ear?) It seems he is attempting to mediate his performance by relying on a concrete artifact against which he can check his description In this case, however, it is not the number of the owl’s ears or their color that is problematic but modifier agreement In line the teacher narrows the problem more specifically by repeating only the word café in a questioning manner Vicente replies by switching to another color, amarillo (yellow) This move is revealing because it suggests strongly that he is not aware of the agreement problem Indeed, he seems to interpret Tracy’s prompt as an indication that he has selected the wrong color term The alternative he produces, amarillo, is also in a singular rather than plural form, and would in addition, require gender agreement (amarillas) In lines through 12, Tracy offers additional hints to lead Vicente to recognize the problem with café, and when these fail to produce a reaction, she offers him a choice in line 13 between the form he produced and the correct one At this point he selects the correct form, and Tracy puts all the elements together in line 15 (dos orejas cafés) and praises Vicente According to the mediational inventory and the mediation chart (Table 1), we see that Tracy recorded a for this interaction and added under comments, “dos orejas café.” In this way, she was able to quickly annotate the nature of the problem Vicente encountered (the lack of concord between orejas and café ) as well as the level of support provided during the interaction (the sixth prompt in the inventory, a choice between alternate forms) Tracy’s chart effectively became a reference to background her interpretations of both Vicente’s subsequent performance and that of the other students Indeed, from the perspective of cumulative G-DA, the mediating potential of the exchange for the rest of the class is of critical importance It should first be noted that the class, taken as a whole, participated in this exchange as secondary interactants This is evident from the explicit moves by both Vicente and Tracy to include the other students in the discussion at various points For example, in line 4, as Vicente struggles to find the appropriate adjectival form, his gaze shifts from the cube, to the teacher, and also to the class Looking to Tracy is certainly not surprising 484 TESOL QUARTERLY because she is the one who is questioning him as well as offering suggestions As mentioned, Vicente imbues the cube with psychological relevance by referencing the image of the owl both during his initial formulation and later in line when Tracy prompts him to reconsider his utterance Vicente draws the class into the interaction by looking to them immediately after first uttering the word café (line 4), perhaps to gauge their response or for reassurance, before turning back to the teacher and repeating his choice of adjective As the interaction continues and Tracy offers more explicit mediation, involvement of the other students is even more evident In lines 10 and 11, after Tracy accepts his choice of café but indicates there is still a problem, Vicente turns from her and repositions his body to face the class as if to recruit their support Some of the learners can be heard murmuring off camera in response, and Tracy quiets them After Tracy’s next prompt, one girl’s participation is even audible (“oh”), and she raises her hand to contribute in line 13 In this instance, Tracy does not call on the volunteer but chooses to wait, allowing Vicente the opportunity to respond Although Tracy certainly could have shifted her focus to the other child, and in this way drawn her more directly into the discussion, she would not have ascertained the precise level of mediation Vicente required As explained, engaging the class as secondary interactants and conducting a series of one-to-one DAs is only one approach to implementing G-DA, but Tracy found it to be an effective way of organizing teaching and assessment with her students As one would expect of a successful cumulative G-DA, the class’s control over noun–adjective agreement improved markedly as the activity progressed Later during the activity, another learner, Gabriela (G), rolled the cube and also had to describe an owl Her performance, as well as that of others in the class, suggests that they were indeed attentive to Tracy’s mediation in Exchange 3: Exchange T: okay ¿cuál animal es? what animal is this? G: uh I don’t get this one T: clase ¿quién puede ayudarle? ¿ cuál animal es? class who can help her what animal is this? (several students raise hands to volunteer) T: uhhhh ¿Josué? J: la lechuza an owl T: la lechuza an owl GROUP DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT: MEDIATION FOR THE L2 CLASSROOM 485 G: uh la lechuza tiene (inaudible) or ? the owl has (inaudible) or ? T: sí G: uh (pause) ¿*dos ala gris? (looks to teacher) wai-wai-wait ¿*dos alas gris? *two gray wing? *two gray wings? 10 T: gooood ¿*alas gris? *gray wings? 11 G: ¿grises? gray? 12 T: excelente muy bien Gabriela excellent very good Gabriela Although Gabriela is unable to remember the word la lechuza, several other learners and volunteer their support, including Josué ( J) After the correct animal name has been established, Gabriela offers her description in line 9, dos ala gris This construction contains two problems: Both ala (wing) and gris (gray) must be made plural because the owl in fact has two wings After producing her initial utterance, Gabriela’s efforts to self-regulate are evident as she switches to English (“wai-wai-wait”) and then reformulates her construction, correctly rendering ala in the plural (alas) This draws praise from Tracy, but she also repeats Gabriela’s corrected utterance with a questioning intonation to express that some problem still remains (line 10) Here Tracy passes through the first two levels of mediation on her inventory, as her elongation of the word good functions similarly to a pause (level 1) in that she does not continue the interaction but instead implies that Gabriela’s answer is not completely correct, a point reinforced when she questioningly repeats Gabriela’s response (level 2) In line 11, Gabriela recognizes the remaining error and corrects it, although she also phrases her response as a question, suggesting that some uncertainty remains To be sure, Gabriela was unable to perform entirely independently, but the level of mediation she required (level 2) was much less than Vicente (level 6) Of course, one cannot know for sure whether the higher quality of Gabriela’s performance is attributable to the mediation Tracy had provided Vicente in Extract It may be the case that Gabriela simply had better control over the patterns for marking substantive-modifier concord than Vicente even before the lesson began Similarly, it is not clear whether the class’s familiarity with the term la lechuza is a result of its use during Vicente’s interaction in Exchange or if it was previously known to most of the class Nevertheless, it must be noted that Gabriela’s performance differs from Vicente’s only with regard to the ZPD and 486 TESOL QUARTERLY not independent functioning That is, neither learner was successful independently, but they can be differentiated according to the level of support both required We may say that Gabriela is developmentally ahead of Vicente because she needed less explicit mediation in order to produce the correct form An assessment that does not permit interaction in the ZPD would have missed this feature of their development and would have erroneously concluded that Gabriela and Vicente are developmentally equivalent Moreover, had both been offered only explicit mediation, as in the case of immediate and overt error correction, the developmental differences between Gabriela and Vicente would have been lost It is only by providing mediation attuned to the ZPD that one may accurately diagnose learners’ abilities and in so doing begin the process of furthering their development (see also Aljaafreh & Lantolf, 1994) It is also apparent from the sequence of interactions that during the course of this 15-minute lesson, the students who took turns rolling the cube and describing animals required decreasing levels of support, a strong indication that all were benefiting from the shifting mediation Tracy provided to individual learners In fact, the performance given in the final example is most impressive of all The student playing the game is Amora (A): Exchange T: (looking out to the class) por favor un voluntario más one more volunteer please (several students raising hands) Amora gracias Amora thank you (Amora comes to the front of the room, takes the cube and tosses it) T: ¿ Cuál animal es? What animal is it? A: La alpaca The alpaca T: okay A: um la alpaca tiene dos ojos (pause) uh negros? the alpaca has two black eyes? T: perfecto dos ojos negros perfect two black eyes At this point in the game, the number of children volunteering to take a turn is suggestive of their growing confidence with the lexical and structural demands of the task Amora’s performance is praised by Tracy in line and earns a from the mediation inventory as no prompts were given Indeed, she supplies the appropriate term la alpaca (line 3) GROUP DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT: MEDIATION FOR THE L2 CLASSROOM 487 without hesitation and produces the construction dos ojos negros on her first attempt It is true that she pauses in line before uttering negros, an indication of internal planning, and as with the learner in Exchange 4, Amora frames her response as a question because she still requires support from Tracy to evaluate the correctness of her performance CONCLUSION The notion of leading a whole class discussion or, conversely, of organizing one-to-one teacher–student exchanges in a whole class setting is hardly a new pedagogical innovation and will certainly be familiar to most classroom practitioners G-DA’s contribution to L2 education is that it renders classroom interactions more systematic and more attuned to learners’ emergent abilities In both the concurrent and cumulative formats, the teacher proceeds from a developmental perspective that informs her moment-to-moment interpretations of learner needs and helps her decide how to best respond Without a theoretically grounded framework for interactions, teachers are left to follow an experiential or intuitive sense of how to support learner development It is difficult to imagine a teacher structuring interactions in either a concurrent or cumulative form without having some appreciation of the dynamics of development Instead, recasts, feedback, and leading questions, if they are provided, would likely be offered with less consistency and would not be intentionally graded in degrees of explicitness In addition to sensitizing teachers to learner development, G-DA as a framework for the classroom also affords the possibility of re-envisioning groups as not only assemblages of individuals but as cohesive units, the development of which is interrelated with the development of individuals Of course, not every mediating move or even every teacher–learner exchange will have the same developmental significance for all learners in the group As pointed out in the example of cumulative G-DA (Exchange 4), Gabriela’s high level of responsiveness to support may or may not have been influenced by Vicente’s immediately preceding exchange with the teacher In fact, although the class as a whole appeared engaged as secondary interactants in each dialogue, one cannot know if every learner in the room was fully attentive.6 For the purpose of classroom practice, the priority is not whether every mediating move benefits every learner but that the group—and each group member—is developing, and this 488 It is interesting that one child seated near the camera in Tracy’s class appeared completely inattentive and was generally either whispering to another student, sorting through papers, or smiling and waving at the camera Nonetheless, whenever called on, her responses suggested she had been listening TESOL QUARTERLY can be determined through both responsiveness to support as well as independent performance The example of concurrent G-DA considered in this article also poses a challenge to the notion that a commitment to fairness requires teachers to offer the same forms of support to all learners The teacher’s exchanges with Beatrice and Michelle (Exchanges and 2) demonstrate how the mediation could not remain the same but needed to change in order to be relevant Similarly, in the cumulative G-DA examples, Tracy’s interactions with Vicente (Exchange 3), Gabriela (Exchange 4), and Amora (Exchange 5) may each serve as a focus of analysis, a series of individual developmental snapshots However, shifting the focus to the group, these isolated snapshots form a moving picture of the class’s development that permits the teacher to interpret the quality of her mediating moves and the learners’ reciprocating behaviors within the context of a broader classroom dialogue In this case, Tracy’s engagement with individuals and the group was also mediated by the symbolic artifacts she created, namely, an inventory of mediating prompts and a mediation chart she carried while teaching These artifacts not only helped her to track learner development over time but also contributed to shaping her interactions with learners as they pulled into focus a range of mediating alternatives of varying explicitness She was also able to chart overall changes in the levels of mediation used from one lesson to the next, and in this way she had a concrete evidential basis for planning subsequent lessons and designing future tasks A final point worth considering concerns group cohesiveness It may be the case that categorizing groups of individuals, as, for instance, cooperatives or collectives, misses the more fundamental dynamic of group relations that the goals, orientations, and responsibilities are always at play, with the result that these categories themselves are not stable Rather, it may be more appropriate to consider groups as collectivizing under certain circumstances and for certain purposes, while understanding that as these circumstances change, so too will the relations among individuals In other words, cooperatives and collectives may emerge during given activities only to disperse once again Following on the earlier example of collective functioning in an airline cockpit, we may note the general lack of cohesion among airline passengers who simply happen to be on the same flight Nevertheless, we must recognize the extraordinary circumstance of United Flight 93 during the September 11th highjacking: The passengers themselves—complete strangers at first, bound together only by space and time—collectivized around the goal of thwarting the terrorists’ plans If cooperation and collectivism are indeed features of participation in activities rather than a typology of groups, the challenge to L2 classroom teachers is to consider how pedagogical tasks as well as appropriate forms of mediation may help to bring out such cohesion GROUP DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT: MEDIATION FOR THE L2 CLASSROOM 489 THE AUTHOR Matthew E Poehner is Assistant Professor of World Languages Education and Applied Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States His research interests include Vygotskian theory and its implications for second language teaching, learning, and assessment He is also the recipient of the 2008 ACTFL-MLA Pimsleur Award for research in foreign language education REFERENCES Ableeva, R (2008) The effects of dynamic assessment on L2 listening comprehension In J P Lantolf & M E Poehner (Eds.), Sociocultural theory and the teaching of second languages (pp 57–86) London: Equinox 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