dynamic assessment: promoting in-service teachers

lst (print) issn 2051-9699lst (online) issn 2051-9702

lst vol 6.1 2019 32–62©2019, equinox publishing

https://doi.org/10.1558/lst.38915

Article

Dynamic Assessment: Promoting In-Service teachers’ conceptual development and pedagogical beliefs in the L2 classroom

Próspero N. García

Abstract

This article on teacher cognition explores the implementation of an interaction-ist Dynamic Assessment (DA) model for mediating and ascertaining in-service L2 teachers’ microgenetic conceptual development after being exposed to Concept-Based Instruction (CBI). Although the effectiveness of this instructional approach in the development of L2 instructors (van Compernolle and Henery, 2015; Williams, Abraham, and Negueruela, 2013), and the use of DA to facilitate L2 development (Anton, 2009; Davin, 2013; Lantolf and Poehner, 2011, 2014; Poehner, 2008) have been both investigated, there is no research addressing the role of DA in fostering the development of in-service L2 teachers’ conceptual language awareness after being exposed to CBI. This article intends to address this gap by exploring the case study of Glinda (pseudonym), an experienced in-service teacher of Spanish whose L1 was also Spanish, and her developing linguistic and pedagogical beliefs regarding the concept of aspect before and after conceptual instruction.

Keywords: Dynamic Assessment; Concept-based instruction; teacher cogni-tion; beliefs; aspect

1. IntroductionCurrent educational models dedicated to the teaching of foreign and second languages in the United States are driven by a ‘rules-of-thumb’ approach (Negueruela and Lantolf, 2006), which tend to ignore how conceptual cate-

Affiliation

Rutgers University, Camden, NJ, USA.email: [email protected]

https://doi.org/10.1558/lst.38915

mailto:[email protected]

Próspero N. García 33

gories of meaning are formed in the L2. This is the case of the grammatical concept of aspect in the Spanish L2 classroom. Indeed, many researchers have shown a general dissatisfaction with the way that it has traditionally been rep-resented by textbooks and other teaching materials (Delgado-Jenkins, 1990; García, 2014; Negueruela, 2003; Negueruela and Lantolf, 2006; Ozete, 1988; Salaberry, 2008; Westfall and Forester, 1996). Rather than representing the relationship between preterit and imperfect tenses as an interconnected one, where the concept of aspect is at the core of their semantic nature, these mate-rials choose to feature them in a taxonomic form, presenting a list of rules that automatically trigger their use. These explanations, based on perceptual crite-ria, refer to restricted contexts generally connected to the presence of certain expressions of time duration, and do not describe the nuanced pragmatic uses that these tenses may profile. One of the most considerable dangers of using this type of approach to teach aspect to L2 learners and in-service teachers – even those whose native language is Spanish – is that these simplified expla-nations eventually become part their own linguistic and pedagogical beliefs (Williams, Abraham, and Negueruela, 2013). Looking at the impact of teachers’ perceptions on how grammatical con-cepts are presented to L2 learners (Andrews, 2003) to become functional cat-egories of thinking for speaking (Williams, Abraham, and Negueruela, 2013; van Compernolle and Henery, 2015), this project intends to explore how the beliefs, conceptual understanding, and linguistic performance of Glinda, a native speaker of Spanish with 8 years of experience teaching the language were shaped by: (1) her previous exposure to a rules-of-thumb approach; (2) her more recent contact with a conceptually-based model; and (3) her aspec-tual development after participating in two interactionist Dynamic Assess-ment (DA), aimed at promoting – as well as diagnosing – her understanding of Spanish preterit and imperfect usage in context. Davin (2016: 5) sug-gests that while metacognitive mediation (i.e. first-order mediation) offered through DA supports the development of the semiotic tools of self-regulation – for example when teachers mediate learners’ performance as they attempt to employ concepts – metacognitive mediation alone is not enough for learn-ers to internalize complex conceptual categories; they also need to be sup-ported with cognitive mediation (i.e. second-order mediation) in the form of culturally constructed tools and materialized conceptual representations to mediate their understanding. In line with Davin (2016), Glinda’s results in this study seem to support the idea that cognitive mediation offered through Concept-Based Instruction (CBI) alone is not enough for teachers to internal-ize complex conceptual categories such as aspect; metacognitive meditation is also needed to be able to develop a more conceptual understanding of aspect. Indeed, based on Glinda’s increasing aspectual understanding through this

34 Dynamic Assessment

study, it is proposed that the combined use of CBI and DA could be a pro-ductive tool to enhance teachers’ conceptual understanding of grammatical categories in their native language by transforming their linguistic and ped-agogical beliefs often based on the simplistic rules-of-thumb offered in text-books (Negueruela, 2003) that constrain their conceptual understanding and language use in pedagogical contexts (i.e. classroom).

2. Teachers conceptual linguistic awareness: The case of aspect

The concept of aspect plays an important role in the expression of past events in both English and Spanish. These two languages, however, partially differ in the way they represent perfectivity and imperfectivity:

Example 1

a. David tocó la guitarra bien David played[3psgPRET] the guitar well “David played the guitar well”b. David tocaba la guitarra bien David played [3psgIMP] the guitar well “David played the guitar well”

Spanish – like English – uses the preterit to refer to bounded events with a clear beginning and/or end (1a). The expression of unbounded events, not-withstanding, is where both languages diverge from each other. While Span-ish marks these actions with the imperfect tense (1b), English employs a variety of linguistic alternatives to convey the same notion, including the use of simple past/preterit forms (David played the guitar well), periphrases that emphasize the habituality of the action (David used to/would play the guitar well) or its pro-gressive nature (David was playing the guitar well), as noted by Andersen (1991) and Comrie (1976). In addition to these morphological considerations, the com-positional nature of aspect entails that the characteristics of a particular verb are also affected by other linguistic factors, such as its inherent argument structure, its lexical nature, or the presence of adverbs and other expressions of time and duration within the same proposition (Hopper, 1982; Verkuyl, 1972). All of these issues make the acquisition of preterit/imperfect aspectual contrasts challenging, even for experienced L2 learners of Spanish with high levels of proficiency (Bardovi Harlig, 2000; Slabakova and Montrul, 2009). Unfortunately, most Spanish textbooks introduce this aspectual contrast as a series of ‘rules of thumb’ (RoT), like the ones in Table 1, that categorize the uses of preterit and imperfect tenses in a way that fails to reflect the full mean-ing of the grammatical concept of aspect (Negueruela and Lantolf, 2006).


Table 1: Uses of the preterit/imperfect. Adapted from Aparisi, Blanco, and Rinka (2007)

Uses of the preterit Uses of the imperfect

• Expresses the beginning and the end of an action

• Completed actions • Narrates a series of actions • Preterit is used to narrate actions that tell

what happened and imply movement in the narration. It has an informative goal.

• Describes an action with no beginning or end

• Habitual actions in the past • Describe a mental, physical, or emotional

state • Tells the time and describes the scene. • Imperfect gives the narration a feeling of

completeness by providing descriptive details (people, landscape, etc.). This description provides an expressive and lyric value to the narration

In summary: The preterit narrates and the imperfect describes

The values included in Table 1 represent the habitual set of grammatical rules that language teachers ask learners to memorize, practice and imple-ment without questioning their validity, functional value or meaning. A simple analysis of its principles, however, suggests that this overly simplified representation does not fully explain the nature of Spanish aspectual con-trasts. Some of the values described in the previous table, for example, pro-vide contradictory information regarding the use of preterit and imperfect, claiming that the former has an informative goal but that the latter should be used to describe a scene. Their descriptions are also based on observations limited to very specific contexts rather than on aspectual generalizations (i.e. imperfect is used for habitual actions or emotional states). The general dis-satisfaction among researchers regarding this pedagogical model, as well as Negueruela’s (2003) findings indicating that learners’ exposure to them may lead to a partial internalization of L2 conceptual categories, poses the ques-tion of how RoT affect teachers’ linguistic awareness and pedagogical beliefs. In this respect, Negueruela (2008) proposes that human beings think in terms of models (i.e. diagrams, drawings, rules, etc.), that they use to regulate their actions. However, we do not always see these representations as the met-aphors that they are; instead, we often understand them as faithful representa-tions of the reality, and as such, we use them to regulate our actions, becoming integrated in our belief system (Williams, Abraham, and Negueruela, 2013). In this sense, teachers’ beliefs, as noted by Ferreira- Barcelós and Kajala (2012: 2), are constructed in discursive practices, organized in clusters and used to make sense of the world and respond to problems, ultimately guiding and influ-encing teachers’ actions. This article aims to explore the effects derived from language teachers’ integration of RoT into their linguistic beliefs. Are these


deductive tools merely used like ‘instant noodles’ (Andrews, 2003: 367), that is, as a fast and useful solution that can be offered to students without integrating them into their linguistic and pedagogical beliefs, or do teachers use them to mediate their students as well as their own performance in a more significant manner? To explore these ideas, a group of language teachers were exposed to a sociocultural approach to the teaching, learning, and assessment of aspectual contrasts including the implementation of Concept-based instruction (CBI) and an interactionist approach to Dynamic Assessment (DA).

2.1. Concept-Based instruction as a tool for L2 teachers and learnersWhile this study focuses on exploring the role of DA in mediating and ascer-taining in-service teachers’ microgenetic conceptual development and their beliefs regarding grammatical categories presented in the L2 classroom, its deployment also involves the examination of whether (and if so, how) Concept-Based Instruction (CBI) fosters teachers’ aspectual awareness. CBI, as originally proposed by Negueruela (2003, 2008), aims at promoting con-ceptual development in the second language (L2) through concept formation (Negueruela and Lantolf, 2006: 81). In this approach, learners are actively encouraged to interact with complex grammatical notions (i.e. mood, voice, aspect) in a significant, coherent, and systematic manner to create new mean-ings in the target language. The materialization, manipulation and transfor-mation of these conceptual understandings is deemed essential to promote linguistic development and critical language awareness in students as well their teachers (García, 2017b; Negueruela and García, 2016). Implementing a CBI approach to language teaching and development entails three basic prin-ciples. First and foremost, instructors need to develop pedagogically-adequate accounts of the phenomena to be presented in the classroom (materializa-tion). Conceptual explanations need to be presented in the form of concise visual representations so learners can assign them functional value, and create meaning through them in communicative activity (manipulation). Lastly, stu-dents need to engage in social interaction – with the self or with others – to convey their conceptual understanding through written and/or oral verbal-izations (transformation) (Negueruela and García, 2016). Negueruela’s (2003) pioneering study on Spanish tense, mood and aspect, has been followed by the implementation of CBI in other languages such as French, English, Chinese and German to foster learners’ development of a wide range of conceptual categories of meaning (Buescher and Strauss, 2015; Gánem-Gutiérrez and Harum, 2011; Kim, 2013; Swain, Lapkin, Knouzi, Suzuki, and Brooks, 2009; van Compernolle, 2014; Walter and van Compernolle, 2017; White, 2012; Zhang, 2014). In the case of L2 Spanish, investigations have focused on the development of motion events (Aguiló-Mora and Negueruela, 2015); loc-


ative prepositions (Serrano-López and Poehner, 2008); the categories of aspect, tense and mood (Gánem-Gutiérrez, 2016; García, 2012, 2014; Negueruela, 2008; Polizzi, 2013); or the sociopragmatics of self-representation, social distance and power in second person personal pronouns (van Compernolle, Webber, and Gomez-Llaich, 2016). Despite the significant number of studies dedicated to the examination of CBI’s effectiveness in promoting L2 learners’ conceptual devel-opment, only two have explored its use to foster teacher’s content and pedagog-ical knowledge: Williams, Abraham, and Negueruela-Azarola (2013) and van Compernolle and Henery (2014). Williams, Abraham, and Negueruela-Azarola (2013) investigated whether L2 Spanish and French teachers would accept CBI as a valid pedagogical approach to present complex grammatical notions to their students. Both novice and experienced instructors were trained to use this model to explore the concept of aspect, examining its effectiveness in describing contextual-ized uses of preterit and imperfect when compared to RoT traditionally fea-tured in L2 textbooks. The results from two case studies indicated that the rejection of widely extended pedagogical practices (i.e. RoTs) was not entirely successful, and that teachers’ previous beliefs about learning and teaching grammar favored the perpetuation of simplified conceptual representations. In line with the previous study, van Compernolle and Henery (2014) ana-lyzed how Concept-Based Pragmatic Instruction (CBPI) affected the devel-opment of pedagogical content knowledge in a L2 French teacher focusing on her internalization of the concepts of self-presentation, social distance, and power as psychological tools for mediating the choice between variable pragmalinguistic forms (e.g. French tu vs. vous), and how she presented them in the classroom. The findings obtained from multiple sets of data showed that the understanding and incorporation of new pedagogical content knowl-edge by language teachers seems to be connected to extensive instruction and feedback from a more experienced collaborator. This is precisely the argu-ment that is developed throughout this article; that it is through mediation in the form of dyadic exchanges that teachers are able to internalize com-plex categories of meaning and adopt more conceptually-based approaches to teaching key grammatical notions in their classrooms. The following sec-tion delves deeper into this topic by exploring the implementation of Dynamic Assessment (DA) in the L2 classroom and examining how it complements CBI instruction in promoting L2 development through mediation during verbal-ization activities.

2.2. Dynamic Assessment in L2 teacher educationFrom an SCT perspective, instruction and assessment form a dialectic in the formation of L2 conceptual development (Lantolf and Poehner, 2004, 2008,


2014; Lidz, 1991). This dialectical relationship is represented in Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) as ‘the distance between the student’s level of independent problem solving and the level of his her problem solving when guided or facilitated by another more competent individual’ (Kozulin, 1998: 161). Dynamic Assessment (DA), one of the main applications of the notion of ZPD to the teaching-learning-evaluation dialectic, has its origins in the Vygotsky’s observations of young children, whose conscious attention and logical thinking appeared to develop as a result of socially mediated activity (Vygotsky, 1978). The need for an instrument that would capture development as an ongoing process promoted the emergence of DA, a form of assessment that incorporates a learning component into the evaluation task, ascertain-ing and promoting students’ potential L2 development (Negueruela, García, and Buescher, 2015: 240). Studies that have implemented DA in their instructional and evalua-tive sequences have followed either an interventionist or an interaction-ist approach (Lantolf and Poehner, 2004). While the former emphasizes the generalization, quantification and standardization of their results by provid-ing mediation through a tightly-scripted series of prompts created before-hand (Haywood and Lidz, 2007), the latter targets learners’ individual ZPD, increasing the possibilities for observation and intervention, and favoring co-construction of knowledge between learner and evaluator (Minick, 1987: 137). In his dissertation, García (2012: 35–38) outlined the potential affordances and constraints of these two approaches, summarized in Table 2.

Table 2: Affordances and constraints of interventionist and interactionist approaches to DA

Type of DA Affordances Constraints

Interventionist – More easily generalizable– Better fit for larger scale

assessments where accountability is a priority

– The type and number of prompts are limited and set beforehand

– Less sensitive to the learner’s ZPD

Interactionist – Mediational tools are not standardized

– Closer to the notion of ZPD given its flexibility

– Teachers need to adapt to learners’ needs on the go

– Assessment may not be as reliable as expected

Since one of the goals of the present study was to raise and increase teach-ers’ grammatical awareness and transform their pedagogical beliefs, I decided


to adopt an interactionist approach to DA. As noted by Poehner (2008: 38), when this type of DA is in play, ‘performance belongs neither to the media-tor nor to the learner but comprises the interplay between them as they raise questions, debate ideas, brainstorm alternatives, offer explanations and jointly work out solutions to assessment tasks.’ Consequently, an interactionist DA allows the mediator to clearly diagnose learners’ previous knowledge and beliefs on a particular topic (i.e. how aspect works in Spanish), while estab-lishing a prognosis, and immediately tune mediation (i.e. interventions) based on their needs. This tool of assessment and instruction has the potential to be an empowering model for the teachers, who, by experiencing it as ‘learn-ers’, might be more inclined to incorporating it to their future instructional practices.

3. The study3.1. Participants information and data collectionThe present study is part of a larger project conducted in a graduate Span-ish class offered at a state research university in the northeast of the USA. The investigation consisted of exposing students to an instructional sequence that included the use of both CBI and DA to teach and assess their previous knowledge of Spanish aspect. The graduate course was comprised by two dif-ferent types of students: (1) in-service teachers whose L1 was Spanish, who had more than five years of experience teaching the language, and who had been living in the US for more than 10 years (n = 3); (2) pre-service teachers whose L1 was either Spanish or English, with no previous experience teach-ing Spanish, and who had been born in the US (n = 3) or resided in it for more than 10 years (n = 5). Given the aims and scope of this article, I will focus on the case study of Glinda (pseudonym), an in-service teacher native of Puerto Rico who had been living in the USA for 13 years. According to the bio-data question-naire collected to gauge participants’ linguistic and instructional experience, Glinda was a native Spanish speaker with eight years of experience teaching both ESL and Spanish in higher education settings to students with a begin-ning and intermediate level in the target language. Although she was a bilin-gual speaker of English and Spanish, her previous experience and dominance in the latter was evidenced by her results in a modified version of the Span-ish DELE test (Diploma de español como lengua extranjera; Montrul and Sla-bakova, 2003) (see Table 3), confirming that this was indeed the language in which she conducted most of her daily interactions (at work, at home, and at the graduate program where this study took place).


Table 3: Personal background of Glinda

Name Place of Birth Age of onset(Span. and Eng.)

DELE results (Proficiency)

Years teaching Spanish (Years)

Glinda Puerto Rico 0;0-5;0 100% (50/50) 8 (college level)

As observed in Table 1, Glinda’s scores (100%) clearly fell within the advanced range (40–50 points), suggesting a very strong command of Span-ish. This factor, along with her experience teaching Spanish, and a reliance on rules-of thumb that appeared to limit her communicative performance in relation to the concept of aspect – as will be shown in the upcoming sections – made her a perfect candidate for the present study.

3.2. Timeline, methodology and coding proceduresThis study was implemented over the course of six weeks, and involved the deployment of the stages shown in Table 4.

Table 4: Timeline of the study and procedures implemented

Week # Procedures/Materials

1: Preliminary assessments Bio-data questionnaire Modified Spanish DELE test

2: Pretest (Interactionist DA) Elicited narration Definition dataCloze test Mediated interviews

3–4: Pedagogical intervention Implementation of Concept-based instruction (CBI)

5: Posttest (Interactionist DA) Elicited narration Definition dataCloze test Mediated interviews

After completing a bio-data questionnaire and the modified DELE pro-ficiency test during the first week of the study, Glinda participated in a DA session to diagnose her use, understanding and potential development of preterit-imperfect aspectual contrasts in Spanish. During this session, she was asked to take part in three different types of tasks (elicited narration, defini-tion exercise, and a cloze test) designed to ascertain her aspectual awareness and control in a dialectically united way (García, 2017a; Negueruela, 2003). The results of these activities were then reviewed during a mediated interview with the researcher following an interactionist model of DA. In what follows,


I will provide a detailed account of the nature of the materials and procedures used as well as their role in the study. The first task involved the elicitation of a written narrative based on El acci-dente de Miguel (‘Miguel’s accident’), a short comic strip depicting a sequence of events involving a bike-rider who was accidentally ran over by a car (Ter-rell, Andrade, Egasse, and Munoz, 2002: 422). Although originally designed to trigger the use of preterit and imperfect forms in context, the flexibility of this task allowed for the use of alternative tenses (i.e. present, progressive forms) when the participants felt they were necessary, providing invaluable informa-tion about their linguistic preferences. The second activity prompted teach-ers to define in their own words what they understood for the grammatical concept of aspect and how it related to the use of Spanish preterit and imper-fect tenses, providing the researcher with information about their aspectual awareness and previous knowledge and beliefs on this particular topic. The third task, a cloze test, featured a series of multiple choice sentences (n = 14) that included contexts that could potentially accept the use of both preterit and imperfect. In order to determine whether participants were influenced by previously learned RoT to make aspectual choices, or if they were constrained in their use of these tenses by only resorting to prototypical aspectual combi-nations (i.e. using the preterit to describe telic events and imperfect for atelic ones), this activity included the presence of linguistic forms, such as specific events, adverbs, and other expressions of time and duration usually linked to the use of preterit and imperfect:

Example 2

El año pasado ________ (ir) todas las semanas a la piscina‘Last year (I) ___________ (go [infinitive]) to the pool every week’(a) fui ‘went[pret.]’ (b)iba ‘went[imp.]’ (c) ambas son posibles ‘both are possible’

The context provided in Example 2, for instance, could trigger three poten-tial answers: (a) the target verb conjugated in the preterit; (b) the same verb in the imperfect; and (c) the possibility that both forms are correct. The pres-ence of the temporal marker todas las semanas (‘every week’), however, might prompt teachers to rely on traditional RoT that would automatically associ-ate the use of the form with imperfect (iba [went (imperfect)]). In this case, however, the use of preterit could also be accepted, especially if the speaker wanted to profile the boundedness of the event instead of its durative and pro-gressive nature. The inclusion of these variables in the activity – along with the implementation of an interactionist DA session to obtain more informa-tion about teachers’ responses – allowed the researcher to identify the extent to which language instructors’ previous pedagogical beliefs and experiences


constrained or enabled their agency as speakers and teachers of Spanish. Thus, while the first and second activities (elicited narration and definitions) pro-vided a general overview of Glinda’s understanding and spontaneous use of preterit and imperfect, allowing her to use a wide range of communicative and avoidance strategies, the cloze activity provided a more concrete picture of her ability to choose and reflect upon the use preterit and imperfect in con-texts where both tenses could potentially be accepted. As previously indicated, teachers were also asked to participate in two dyadic interactionist DA sessions to reflect on the rationale behind their aspectual choices. These interviews generally lasted for 30 minutes and took place after the three static tasks had been completed. These exchanges were led by the course’s main instructor and researcher, who would inquire about the use of a particular verbal form in the participants’ narrative. Additional verbal prompts to encourage deeper reflections and more elaborate explana-tions were provided based on the teachers’ responses. After the pretest, the researcher implemented a CBI sequence in the class-room (weeks 3 and 4) to address the teaching and learning of the gram-matical concept of aspect in Spanish. During these sessions students were presented with three different Schemes of Complete Orienting Basis of Action (SCOBA; Gal’perin, 1989, 1992) designed as mediational tools for internalizing the concept at hand. Although very different in design, all three SCOBAs, obtained from García (2012), Negueruela and Lantolf (2006), and Yáñez-Prieto (2008), introduced the notions of lexical and grammatical aspect, and tackled the contrast between preterit and imperfect using visual aids (see Appendices 1, 2 and 3 for more details). The aim of presenting and using these models when choosing between preterit and imperfect was to confront participants’ previous knowledge (potentially based on simplified RoT) to demonstrate that they were insufficient to illustrate the wide range of linguistic uses and manifestations of these two tenses. To better support the preferences and needs of every teacher, they were given the opportunity to adopt any of the models provided to mediate and transform their aspec-tual understanding. The rationale behind this decision is closely linked to the sociocultural notion of L2 conceptual development: in the same way that not all types of teaching and learning lead to development (Vygotsky, 1986), the use of specific symbolic meditational tools to provide effective support may not be effectively tuned to all learners’ ZPD, failing to provide effective medi-ation towards their conceptual development. Consequently, it was expected that by presenting teachers with several SCOBAs, there would be a higher chance for them to find one that would be better suited to their individual needs. Additionally, it would potentially allow them to understand that con-ceptual models could be adapted to best fit their preferences as learners and


teachers of the language, providing them with a flexibility that may facilitate the adoption of CBI in their classes. During the first meeting in Week 3, participants were introduced to the SCOBAs and asked to explore and discuss them in groups with the objective of encouraging familiarization and future use. Then, they were asked to apply the chosen model(s) to reflect on the presence of preterit or imperfect in a par-ticular text. In the second class, participants engaged in strategic interaction (i.e. scenarios adapted from Di Pietro, 1987), and used the SCOBAs to analyze and reflect on their aspectual choices. The main goal of these sessions was to introduce a didactic model that instructors could use as a tool to understand their linguistic performance when engaged in aspectual communicative tasks, so that they could apply it to their own teaching. The last stage of the project took place during week 6 and consisted in the completion of a posttest, which presented the same configuration as the pretest (elicited narration, definition, cloze test, and a mediated interview). The coding and analysis used in this study differed based on the type of activity. In the case of the elicited production task, verbal forms were classi-fied according to their tense, aspect, number and person features, as well as their grammaticality. This last consideration generated an overall accuracy score that provided information about Glinda’s control of preterit and imper-fect in production (see Table 5 for examples). Data from the cloze test was coded based on the participants’ availability to use both aspectual readings: they received a point if they only accepted one form (i.e. responses (a) and (b) illustrated in Example 2), or two if they considered both tenses as grammat-ical options (i.e. response (c) in the same example). Consequently, someone who consistently chose one tense (preterit or imperfect) throughout the 14 target contexts, would obtain a score of 50%. Lastly, the mediated verbalizations recorded during the DA sessions, as transcribed by the author, were used to examine the effect of several factors (i.e. lexical aspect, grammatical instruction experience, etc.) in participants’ aspectual choices, aiming at ascertaining and promoting their aspectual development (i.e. conceptual awareness and control) over time. Results from these tasks are reported and analyzed in the following section.

4. Findings and analysis4.1. Written performance before and after the pedagogical

implementationTable 5 reports Glinda overall accuracy on the two written tasks (elicited nar-ration and cloze test) before and after CB-I.


Table 5: Aspectual accuracy in the elicited narration (Task 1) and the cloze (Task 2)

Before CBI (Pretest) After CBI (Posttest)

Assessment Task 1 Task 2 Task 1 Task 2

Static 19/20 (95%)

14/28 (50%)

18/18 (100%)

16/28 (57.1%)

Dynamic 20/20 (100%)

19/28 (67.8%)

18/18 (100%)

28/28 (100%)

At first glance, the results of the initial (static) assessment of Glinda’s responses reported in Table 5 paint a rather disconcerting picture of her over-all control of aspect. As predicted by her DELE results (100%) and her linguis-tic profile – native speaker of Spanish with eight years of experience teaching the language – her performance in the elicited narration activity (task 1) was almost at ceiling during the pretest (95%), and after the pedagogical interven-tion (100%). However, her results on the cloze test (task 2) provided somewhat contradictory information about her aspectual control in relation to the use of preterit and imperfect. Even though all the target contexts allowed for the presence of both tenses – choosing one over the other would depend on the speakers’ communicative intent – Glinda was only able to accept 50% of the items as appropriate during the written part, and 67.8% when offered medi-ation during the dynamic part of the test (i.e. dyadic mediated interview) before CBI. Although her results after the pedagogical intervention did not improve dramatically on the static part of the assessment (57.1%), Glinda was able to accept both preterit and imperfect in all of the contexts present in the cloze test when offered the opportunity to reflect on her responses, and after receiving mediation during the second DA session. This shift in her ability to accept both tenses in every situation as a result of offering various levels of mediation during the interactionist DA (from self-regulation to implicit/explicit other-regulation) suggests that, while a complete understanding of the concept of aspect had not yet been internalized, it was within Glinda’s ZPD at that point, as seen in her ability to accept both preterit and imperfect (even in non-prototypical combinations featuring certain trigger expressions) with the help of a more knowledgeable individual, as it will be shown in the following sections. Overall, these results show that, when asked to create a spontaneous nar-rative in her L1 (Spanish), Glinda’s command of the language allowed her to adopt a wide range of communicative strategies that derived in the cor-rect use of both preterit and imperfect in context. However, when faced with prototypical – and especially – non-prototypical grammatical-lexical aspect combinations (i.e. using imperfect with telic predicates) she had trou-


ble accepting both, even when they were grammatical, as it was the case for all the actions used in the cloze test. While this might not be an issue in her everyday Spanish usage, it could become problematic for her teaching prac-tice (i.e. explicit aspectual knowledge is needed to teach this concept to her own students).

4.2. Definition data: Aspectual awarenessIn order to assess Glinda’s conceptual awareness, she was requested to explain in her own words what she understood by ‘aspect’, and how it related to the use of preterit and imperfect in Spanish. These definitions were expected to illustrate her language awareness in relation to the concept of aspect and ‘its potential quality to orient and mediate communicative activity’ (García, 2014: 219). Although she was given the opportunity of conveying her explanation in English or Spanish, she chose to do it in the latter, claiming that she felt more comfortable in this language:

Excerpt 1: Glinda’s aspectual understanding before CBI

En español el pretérito se usa para expresar una acción que ya pasó y no tiene con-tinuidad. El imperfecto se usa para narrar eventos en el pasado. El pretérito cul-mina la acción expresada en el imperfecto incluyendo otra acción o la misma. Yo comía una hamburguesa y sonó mi teléfono.

[In Spanish, preterit is used to indicate an action that already happened and has no continuity. Imperfect is used to narrate events in the past. Preterit culminates the action expressed by the imperfect, including a different or the same action. I ate (imperfect) a burger and my phone rang (preterit)]

As can be seen in Excerpt 1, Glinda’s understanding of the relationship between preterit and imperfect was not based on the concept of aspect, but rather on a set of RoT very similar to those presented in Spanish textbooks (see Table 1). Preterit, according to her, was used to point out actions that had already happened, that were not ongoing or that generally stopped other actions. Imperfect, on the other hand, was used to narrate events in the past that were ‘interrupted’ by another one (expressed in the preterit). When looking at her explanation, it seems apparent that her years of experience teaching these tenses using a set of RoT provided by the textbook have shaped her linguistic beliefs, integrating a simplified approach to teach aspect in the classroom. This fragmented vision explained why she had trouble accepting prototypical and non-prototypical aspectual combinations on task 2 (cloze test). Her definitions in Excerpt 1 did not mention the role of the speaker’s perspective in choos-ing a specific tense to express an action and lacked any references to lexical


(bounded/unbounded) and grammatical aspect in reference to the use of pret-erit and imperfect. Instead, she focused on the notions of completion/incom-pletion or communicative functions (i.e. using imperfect in narratives) to make sense of how tense and aspect can be characterized in Spanish.

Excerpt 2: Glinda’s aspectual understanding after CBI

Es pretérito cuando una acción tienen un principio determinado y una acción com-pletada (ej. “yo tomé un vaso”. Se entiende que ya no hay contenido). Imperfecto: Indefinido/ mucha continuidad (ej. “Yo caminaba por la calle”. La acción circula).

[(It is) Preterit when an action has a concrete beginning, and when it is a complete action (i.e. “I had (preterit) a glass.” It is understood that the glass is empty). Imper-fect: Non-defined/lots of continuity (i.e. “I walked [imperfect] through the street.” The action circulates]

After her first DA session, and exposure to CBI, Glinda’s aspectual aware-ness improved exponentially. Although she was still unable to explicitly incorporate lexical aspect in her definition, she is able to do so implicitly, as observed in her example of tomar (had [preterit]) a cyclic verb, or the incor-poration of the notion of perspective into her definition. This was particularly visible in her use of a graphic representation to explain the unbounded nature of imperfect in the sentence Yo caminaba por la calle [I was walking [imper-fect] down the street] (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Glinda’s graphic representation after CBI.

At that point in the study, Glinda seemed to be aware that preterit could be used to indicate the beginning or the end/completion of an action (i.e. boundedness), and that the imperfect marked an event that was ongoing, not constrained by temporal bounds (i.e. unboundedness), as illustrated by the pictorial representation (Figure 1) based on García’s (2012) SCOBA, which she used as a semiotic tool to guide (i.e. regulate) her conceptual understanding. Her apparent developing aspectual awareness, however, could be inert knowl-edge, which Vygotsky characterizes as verbalism – knowledge that is exces-sively abstract and detached from reality (1986: 148), in a way that it cannot be applied to concrete communicative situations to make meaning. To avoid this ambiguity, García (2014, 2017) proposed the triangulation of performance,


definition and verbalization to obtain a more comprehensive picture of L2 conceptual development than the one present in more traditional ‘product-oriented perspectives’ (Lantolf and Poehner, 2014), primarily focused on lin-guistic performance as the main marker of L2 acquisition.

4.3. Mediated verbalizations though dyadic interactionist dynamic assessment

Although the previous sections provided useful information regarding Glin-da’s aspectual awareness (i.e. definition data) and control (i.e. performance in tasks 1 and 2), they did not provide a global vision of her developing lin-guistic awareness as a conceptual process. To do so, this study implemented two interactionist DA sessions aimed at ascertaining and promoting Glinda conceptual development in her L1. The analysis on this section focuses on the mediation provided to her during these interviews, as well as on her flourish-ing linguistic awareness. In this sense, instead of examining conceptual devel-opment as a individualistic process, the adoption of a sociocultural approach (Negueruela, 2003; García, 2017) allows for a dynamic vision of this notion, fostering it through mediation tuned to the student/teachers’ ZPD. Indeed, Vygotsky (1978) argues that development of higher psychological functions is always social, appearing first at the inter-personal level (i.e. between people) before being internalized at the individual level through intra-personal com-munication (i.e. I-me communication). The implementation of an interac-tionist DA before and after CBI promoted precisely this process, attempting to provide Glinda with opportunities to learn and/or modify her beliefs about the uses of Spanish preterit and imperfect in her written narration and cloze test (tasks 1 and 2 respectively).

4.3.1. Glinda’s mediated verbalizations before CBIAs mentioned earlier, Glinda’s aspectual control in the elicited narration task was at ceiling both before and after CBI (see Table 5), as initially predicted by her linguistic and social profile (an educated native speaker of Spanish) and her DELE test results. Given her lack of errors in the first task, the analysis of her aspectual awareness will focus on her responses in the cloze test, which showed an overreliance on temporal markers and RoT to orient her aspec-tual decisions.

Excerpt 3

1 M: “El año pasado iba todas las semanas a la piscina”. ¿Por qué iba? [Last year I went (imperfect) to the pool every week. Why “I went” (imperfect)?]

2 G: Todas las semanas [Every week]


In Excerpt 3, for example, Glinda is asked to justify her choice of imper-fect in a particular sentence. Without hesitation, she mentions that the time expression todas las semanas [every week] automatically triggered the use of this tense. Even though the sentence reproduced in Excerpt 3 could poten-tially accept both preterit or imperfect, her answer was directly connected to the RoT provided by most textbooks (i.e. one must use imperfect for habitual actions in the past), limiting her aspectual choices. After this short exchange, the mediator proceeded to ask her whether preterit could have been used in the same context (turn 1, Excerpt 4).

Excerpt 4

1 M: OK, ¿Se puede decir: el año pasado: eh, ¿fui todas las semanas a la piscina? [Ok, could one say: Last Year: eh, I went (preterit) to the pool every week?]

2 G: ++ Se podría decir [One could say that]

3 M: ¿Habría alguna diferencia? [Would there be a difference (between the two?]

4 G: Eh: ++ que solamente ++ bueno en realidad no no no hay diferencia + porque uno puede decir depende de la perspectiva también porque yo puedo decir “el año pasado fui todas las semanas a la piscina” queriendo decir eh: iba todas las semanas pero + también yo puedo decir IBA de descripción de movimiento hacia un lugar. [Eh: ++ only that++ well there is actually no difference [between those uses] + because one can say [that] it also depends in the perspec-tive, because I can say “last year I went (preterit) every week to the pool” meaning, eh: I went (imperfect) every week but + I can also say I WENT (imperfect) describing movement towards a place]

As it can be seen in Excerpt 4, Glinda hesitatingly accepted the option of using preterit (line 2) after being prompted by the interviewer. However, when asked if there was any difference between the two (preterit and imper-fect), she indicated that there was none, stating that even if one were to use the preterit in the same context, its value would still be that of an imperfect (turn 4). Although this may suggest that she considered both options as pos-sible (although with a clear preference towards the use of the imperfect), the dyadic exchange showed that Glinda was in fact unable to establish a distinc-tion between preterit and imperfect in this context, a common trait observed in L2 learners (Negueruela anf Lantolf, 2006; García 2014; Yáñez-Prieto, 2008) exposed to formal instruction based on RoT. Glinda’s overt dependence on temporal markers and rules of thumb to regulate her aspectual choices is per-haps the most evident in Excerpt 5.


Excerpt 5

1 M: ¿Por qué “Ayer + empecé a estudiar a las seis de la tarde”? [Why ‘Yesterday I began (preterit) to study at 6:00pm?]

2 G: Ayer + y simplemente dice a las seis de la tarde o sea que quiere decir que significa que +++ sí tiene que ser pretérito porque en imperfecto sería+ tendría que decir “ayer empezaba estudiar a las” no porque está “ayer”. Es pretérito. [Yesterday + and it simply says at 6:00 pm, which means that +++ Yes it has to be preterit because in the imperfect it would have to say “Yesterday I began (imperfect) to study at” no because you have “yesterday.” It is preterit]

3 M: ¿Y por qué es el pretérito entonces? [Why preterit, then?]

4 G: Porque es una vez. [Because, It happens once]

5 M: ¿Una vez? [Once?]

6 G: Y ya la acción pasó. [And the action is completed]

When the mediator asked her to reflect on her choice of preterit for the verb empezar [to begin], Glinda mentioned that the presence of the temporal marker ayer [yesterday] triggered her use of preterit, a decision that was rein-forced by the inclusion of a specific expression of time (seis de la tarde; [six p.m.]) at the end of the sentence (turn 2). Interestingly, as she began to verbal-ize the imperfective alternative (Ayer empezaba estudiar a las seis [Yesterday I began (imperfect) to study at six]) in the same turn, she regulated herself in mid-sentence (no porque está ayer [no because you have yesterday]), lead-ing her to confirm her initial choice that that the verb had to be expressed in the preterit. Even though her aspectual choice in this context appeared to be constrained by the temporal marker ayer [yesterday], when probed again by the interviewer (turns 3 and 5), Glinda resorted to additional textbook expla-nations (turns 4 and 6) based on observation (es una vez [it happens once]); la acción pasó [the action is completed], rather than on the lexical and gram-matical properties of the action.

4.3.2. Glinda’s mediated verbalizations after CBIAs observed in Table 5, Glinda’s performance on the cloze test before and after CBI showed a slight increase when analyzed from a static perspective (accuracy in the pretest = 50%; and in the posttest = 57.1%). The compar-ison between her mediated verbalizations on the second DA session, how-ever, revealed much more noticeable improvements. While she was only able to accept both preterit and imperfect in a 67.8% of the cases during the pre-test, Glinda’s mediated verbalizations in the posttest allowed her to raise her


acceptance of both tenses from the reported 57.1%, to 100%. The following excerpts illustrate some of the changes in her second exposure to an interac-tionist DA.

Excerpt 6

1 G: … Para mí, el pretérito sí tiene una acción que empieza y termina pero el imperfecto no.[… to me, preterit points to the beginning and end of an action and the imperfect doesn’t]

2 M: ¿Cómo qué empieza y termina? (What do you mean by beginning and end?)

3 G: ¡Ay, profesor! [Ay, professor!]

4 M: Sí, sí, ¿qué quieres decir? [Yes, yes, what do you mean?]

5 G: Pues que con el pretérito yo puedo decir “yo tomé un vaso ayer”[With the preterit I could say “I drank (preterit) a glass yesterday”]

6 M: Aha

7 G: Y primero tiene un+, eh+ A pesar de que tiene “ayer” + que eso no tiene que ver porque yo podría decir “ayer tomaba un vaso”.[And first it has a+ Even though it has “yesterday” (temporal marker), it doesn’t mean anything because I could say “yesterday I drank (imperfect) a glass”]

8 M: Sí. (Ok)

9 G: Pero se sobreentiende que una vez cuando yo diga “ayer tomé un vaso” no hay más contenido, pero si digo “ayer tomaba” la acción puede no estar completa. [But it is understood implicitly that once I say “Yesterday I drank (preterit) a glass” the glass becomes empty, but if I say “Yesterday I drank (imperfect) the action may not be completed]

The exchange reproduced in Excerpt 6 shows that Glinda’s conceptual understanding of aspect was much more sophisticated at this stage, allowing her to acknowledge multiple readings of the same sentence regardless of the appearance of temporal markers. At the beginning (turn 1), she acknowledged that while the preterit is generally used to express bounded actions, the imper-fect indicates that an event has no temporal limits. When requested to clarify her rationale in more detail, she provided an example that allowed for the use of both preterit and imperfect, explaining how choosing one over the other would change the meaning of the sentence (turns 5, 7, and 9). Perhaps one of the biggest changes in her understanding of aspect was detected in Glinda’s purposeful incorporation of the temporal marker ayer [yesterday], which had


clearly constrained her performance in the past, in her example. Unlike her previous justifications during the pretest (see Excerpt 5), at this time she not only understood that it did not prevent the use of the imperfect (turn 7), she mentions the fact that the speaker’s perspective over an action influences how he/she wants to characterize it (i.e. bounded or unbounded), which eventually triggers the choice between preterit and imperfect (turn 9). Evidence of Glin-da’s aspectual development in relation to the constraining value of relying on temporal markers is also provided in Excerpt 7.

Excerpt 7

1 G: Mire++ Para mí,(laughs) todas estas preguntas me ayudan muchísimo. Porque yo, la primera, yo la primera vez cuando yo completé las oraciones.[Look++ For me (laughs) all these questions help me a lot. Because I, the first time, the first time that I completed these sentences]

2 M: Aha…

3 G: Yo completé las oraciones. Yo puse+ vi “el año pasado” y rápidamente puse “fui”[I completed these sentences. I did+ I saw “last year” and I quickly wrote “went” (preterit)]

4 M: Sí (Ok)

5 G: Pero cuando terminé de leer todo, que veo “todas las semanas” para mí eso marca una continuidad+ y normalmente+ como le comenté cuando estábamos haciendo el primer dibujo.[But when I read the whole thing, I saw “every week”. To me this [temporal marker] indicates continuity+ and normally+ as I said when we were working on the first drawing]

6 M: Aha

7 G: Hay como que una transición de una semana, otra semana, otra semana… Entonces si nos referimos a la SCOBA, tiene el dibujo de la continuación.[There is like a transition from one week to the next, and to the next. So if we think of the SCOBA, it has the continuity drawing]

8 M: Sí (Ok)

9 G: Porque entonces estoy desde fuera viendo la perspectiva desde fuera++ el ojo.(Because then, I am outside, my perspective is from outside++ the eye)

10 M: Sí, el ojo, ¿no? El ojo (laughs) [Yes, the eye, isn’t it? the eye (laughs)]


11 G: (laughs) El ojo que usted dibujó. Estoy viendo desde acá, hablando desde el presente pero mirando al pasado.(The eye that you drew. I am looking from here, talking from the present but looking at the past)

This exchange illustrates Glinda’s developing conceptual awareness when she mentions her newfound realization that temporal markers had con-strained her understanding of aspect as well as her use of preterit and imper-fect (turns 1, 3, and 5). According to her, this discovery was connected to the mediated verbalizations that took place during the DA portion of the task, which had helped her transform her aspectual understanding (turn 1). Next, she described in detail how her first instinct of using preterit after seeing the temporal marker el año pasado [last year] was mitigated when she realized that imperfect could also be a possibility in that context (turn 5) depend-ing on the speakers’ perspective and the type of event that he/she wanted to emphasize (turn 9). Interestingly, she explicitly credited the incorporation of the content knowledge from two of the SCOBAs introduced during CBI (see Appendixes 1 and 3) as one of the keys to improve her conceptual understand-ing of aspect (turns 7, 9, and 11). To obtain more information about Glinda’s beliefs in relation to the teaching and learning of preterit and imperfect in the Spanish classroom, the mediator asked her to reflect upon the challenges that she had encountered during the proposed sequence of activities.

Excerpt 8

1 G: … Es que normalmente uno le dice a los estudiantes que, eh++, se le dice a los estudiantes en el libro de texto, eh+ normalmente se usa el imperfecto para una narración en el pasado+ pero como usted tam-bién me dijo, ambos son narraciones […][… Usually it is said to students that, eh++, textbooks tell students eh+, that imperfect is used to narrate in the past+ but like you told me, both [preterit and imperfect] are used to narrate […]]

2 M: Aha

3 G: Y entonces uno que rápidamente ve una ambigüedad en el texto.[And then you suddenly see an ambiguity in the text]

4 M: ¿Y cómo lo aplicas ahora en tus clases? [And, how do you apply (this new knowledge) into your own classroom?]

5 G: … Sí, yo les digo a mis estudiantes que no se enfoquen mucho en pal-abras como “anoche”, “ayer”+ [… Yes, I tell my students not to focus so much in words such us “last night”, “yesterday”+]

6 M: Sí (Ok)


7 G: Sino que tienen que leer toda la oración para poder identificar [Instead they should read the whole sentence to be able to identify (the appropriate tense)]

8 M: Aha

9 G: que se traten de poner dentro de la oración, que traten de ver la perspec-tiva no de solamente los que leen+, sino que se pongan fuera de la oración y vean cómo ellos lo dirían. [that they should try to put themselves within the sentence. They should try to look not only at their perspective as readers+, but at the sentence from the outside and think about how they would say it]

In Excerpt 8, Glinda explained how traditional textbook explanations based on RoT perpetuated unclear representations of how preterit and imper-fect work, prompting the teacher to simplify the rationale behind using one over the other (turn 1). She also mentioned how the mediation provided by the researcher during the previous DA session eventually allowed her to under-stand that it is possible for there to be aspectual ambiguities, and that their res-olution will be based on the speaker’s perspective (turns 3, 5, 7 and 9). When the mediator asked her whether – and if so, how – she had applied her new con-ceptual understanding to her own teaching (turn 4), Glinda explained that she had begun to tell her students that they should not focus on temporal mark-ers to make aspectual decisions (turn 5), but rather on the meaning of the sen-tence based on how they looked at the event from a particular vantage point – a clear reference to Yáñez-Prieto’s (2008) SCOBA – (see Appendix 3). In this sense, she was asking learners to break away from the incomplete and agentive-less explanations provided by Spanish textbooks, and to reflect upon the infor-mation that they wanted to convey when presenting past events instead.

5. Discussion and conclusionsThis study also set out to examine the value of DA as a mediational tool to pro-mote and ascertain in-service teachers’ microgenetic development as a con-ceptual process after being exposed to a deductive instructional approach on the pedagogical and linguistic beliefs of experienced in-service teachers. The case study of Glinda, a native speaker of Spanish with eight years of expe-rience teaching the language at the college level, seems to invariably sug-gest that previous beliefs about how to effectively teach a particular topic (i.e. Spanish aspect) deeply affect teachers’ understanding and use of said gram-matical notion. Glinda’s results before being exposed to CBI, for example, revealed that her aspectual choices were heavily anchored in her reliance on a set of simplified rules provided by the textbook. The use of these explana-


tions to mediate her linguistic performance appeared to limit her ability to understand aspectual distinctions or to accept non-prototypical combinations that contradicted her grammatical beliefs. Additionally, it became clear that her dependence on RoT limited the extent to which Glinda could use lan-guage to represent their reality, crucially constraining her linguistic reper-toire in Spanish as a consequence of giving her agency to this incomplete set of rules. Although her performance on the elicited narration task before and after the pedagogical intervention was almost at ceiling, her aspectual defini-tions and static and dynamic results on the cloze test, followed a pattern typi-cally observed in L2 populations (García, 2012, 2014; Negueruela and Lantolf, 2006; Polizzi, 2013; Yáñez-Prieto, 2008). This would seem to suggest that the adoption of a deductive approach supported by RoT to mediate the internal-ization of aspect might be counterproductive not only for L2 learners’ devel-opment, but also their teachers. Glinda’s mediated verbalizations during the implementation of the interac-tionist DA provided invaluable insight regarding this issue in three different ways. First, it allowed the investigator to analyze Glinda’s aspectual beliefs and identify potential issues regarding her agency as a language user and teacher. These verbal exchanges also established the type and amount of external medi-ation needed to complete a previously seen task successfully, determining Glin-da’s potential development. Lastly, an interactionist approach to DA provided the participant with the opportunity to reflect on her linguistic and pedagog-ical beliefs, and transform them on her path towards conceptual internal-ization. This agentive move allowed her to pull away from the constraining RoT that were limiting her linguistic repertoire, and to rely more on her own conceptual understanding. In summary, it was through DA that it became possible to observe and promote her command of aspectual distinctions, an option that was not present during the static part of the assessment. This find-ing strongly suggests that the inclusion of this tool of instruction and evalu-ation in the training of language teachers can be a feasible way of promoting the co-construction of conceptual language awareness through conscious con-ceptual manipulation, while transforming grammatical beliefs though artifi-cial crises. However, it is important to have in mind that, while pedagogical content knowledge is crucial for teachers’ cognitive development, it may not be sufficient to change their pedagogical and linguistic beliefs, as observed in Wil-liams, Abraham, and Negueruela (2013), van Compernolle and Henery (2014) or in Davin, Herazo, and Sagre, (2016). Another question that this paper addressed was whether it was valuable for experienced in-service teachers – whose L1 is also the language of instruction – to be trained in and receive exposure to CBI. While Glinda’s performance in the written elicited narration and cloze tasks did not increase dramatically


from the pretest to the posttest, there were traces of an increased conceptual awareness in her definition data during the same period, and an exponential increase in her mediated performance during the dynamic part of the test. Even though this seemed to suggest that the internalization of aspect was not complete, as she was not able to consistently use this concept to regulate her performance, it seemed to be within her ZPD during the second DA session as indicated by the increased levels of accuracy during her mediated perfor-mance. However, while Glinda’s exposure to CBI allowed her to consciously manipulate and interact with a rather complex grammatical notion, triggering the development of an awareness that become the first step towards concep-tual internalization and the reshaping of her existing pedagogical and lin-guistic beliefs, conceptual mediation offered through the DA was still needed to further reshape those beliefs. This findings are in line with Davin’s (2016) proposals: While cognitive mediation presented through CBI in the form of culturally constructed tools and materialized conceptual representations (i.e. SCOBAs) to mediate Glinda’a initial conceptual understanding, metacogni-tive mediation presented through DA reinforced her development of the nec-essary semiotic tools of self-regulation to bring her aspectual understanding and use to a different level. In order to increase the likelihood of teachers inte-grating new instructional practices in the classroom, tools like CBI and DA should target their linguistic and conceptual development first, ensuring that they control the grammatical properties taught before they engage in peda-gogical activity.

About the authorPróspero N. García is associate professor of Spanish applied linguistics at Rutgers University, Camden. His research focuses on sociocultural psychology applied to heritage and second language development, mediated language evaluation and assessment, teachers’ cognition, and technology-enhanced language learning.

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Appendix 1: García’s (2012) SCOBA

Understanding ASPECTThe concept of aspect indicates the speaker’s perspective over an action. That is, what is the part/action that you as the speaker/writer want to emphasize. Aspect is determined by two factors:

a. Lexical aspect: based on the meaning of the verb (bounded or unbounded).b. Grammatical aspect: based on the context of an action (perfective or imperfective).

When these two elements are combined they can emphasize the beginning, end, middle, or completion of an action. The speaker’s perspective over the past action to choose between pret-erit and imperfect is determined by the following questions:

– What part of the action is the speaker emphasizing?– Does the verb have bounded meaning on itself (e.g. To fall)?– Where in the past is the action from our present perspective?


Appendix 2: Negueruela and Lantolf’s (2006) SCOBA


Appendix 3: Yáñez-Prieto’s (2008) SCOBA

dynamic assessment: promoting in-service teachers

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