DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT IN TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES MEASURING UNIVERSITY TEACHERS' AWARENESS

The paper investigates the role of Dynamic Assessment (DA) as opposed to the socalled Static (Non-dynamic) Assessment in relation to teaching English as a foreign language in higher school environments. Though the key phenomenon is thought to have derived from the works of the prominent Soviet psychologist L.Vygotslcy, review of the related literature has revealed that to date, it has not gained enough coverage by methodologists in Russia. The theoretical part of the current research, therefore, was aimed at describing the nature of DA in teaching, pinpointing its peculiarities versus static assessment and fmding out its benefits if any. In the experimental part of the research practitioners in the field from different universities of Russia were asked to take part in the survey which sought to implicitly and explicitly examine their attitudes toward the dynamic type of assessment and pertained to measuring their awareness of this phenomenon. The statistics collected from the experiment indicated a low level of DA awareness among University teachers. In light of this, it should be concluded that the discovered benefits to the development of linguistic competence when learning a foreign language through DA should be announced, that is why the authors of suchlike studies are recommended to actively share their results with their peers.