The Role of Mediation in Korean Middle School Students' Grammar Learning: A Case Study

Abstract

This study explored two cases of Korean middle school students who participated in DA (Dynamic Assessment) in teaching grammar. Two middle school students from Seoul were chosen as participants based on their English proficiency and a lack of over-seas study experience. The study employed a qualitative approach to get an in-depth ex-amination of the two students syntactic development of target forms. The methods of data collection used were picture description tasks. First, students were asked to write a paragraph describing the given pictures, using grammatical structures that were found to be problematic for them. Then, the mediator read their writing to detect any errors and provided mediation based on a mediation scale in order to lead the student to correct their errors. After each individual session with the students, the mediator transcribed the recording of the session and drew Language-Related Experiences. The findings of the study are 1) the frequency of the mediation scale varied

2) students English proficiency levels and the nature of target forms influenced the effectiveness of the mediation

3) students used their first and second languages as mediational tools, relying on different modes of language with varying portions

4) the teacher played a crucial role in imple-menting DA as the mediator. Based on the aforementioned findings, the following peda-gogical implications were drawn: 1) mediation has a pedagogical impact on enhancing students linguistic development

2) real-world constraints should be overcome to im-plement DA in the Korean context

3) DA can be a tool to develop teacher expertise.