Elmira Shahin and Rana Azarizad/ Elixir Soc. Sci. 76 (2014) 28483-28486 28483 Introduction Listening is an active cognitive process involving, hearing, understanding, integrating and responding (Vandergrift, 2004, as cited in Smith, 2006). Many learners need to be a good listener to solve their problems at school, work, travel or other contexts and language schools have answered to these wants by making a variety of courses and materials to maintain the teaching of listening. Over the last two decades, there has been a change towards comprehension and now Listening comprehension is considered as an essential part of learning (Morley, 2001). The teaching of listening comprehension has long been “somewhat neglected and poorly taught aspect of English in many EFL programs” (Mendelsohn, 1994, p.9), while it is at present considered essential in both EFL classrooms and SLA research (Matsuoka, 2009). Listening skill is engaged in communication and cannot be tested best traditionally in an artificial testing atmosphere of a class; therefore, testing it in a direct (TLU) and communicative way is of utmost importance. ' Dynamic assessment' seems to be one of the appropriate choices to fulfill this purpose. Poehner and Lantolf (2005) define dynamic assessment (DA) as the interaction between the assessor as intervener and learners as active participant with the aim of making some cognitive changes in the learners during the process of assessing and learning. Vygotsky's sociocultural theory and ZPD, which are the main theories behind the dynamic assessment, can reiterate the interactive and communicative nature of dynamic assessment. This is exactly what we are after for assessing a communicative skill like listening which cannot be considered as a passive skill any more. However, formative assessment is still another way of testing through a dynamic way which suits testing listening. Black and William (1998) argue that formative assessment, properly employed in the classroom, will help students learn what is being taught to a substantially better degree. DA and FA can be differentiated in many ways. While DA can be accomplished formally or informally, it must, by definition, be systematic. It should be remembered that the defining characteristic of DA is the negotiation of mediation aimed at development; in DA, mediation cannot be offered in a haphazard, hit-or miss fashion but must be tuned to those abilities that are maturing, and as they mature further as a consequence of mediation, the mediation itself must be continually renegotiated. This is what it means to engage in the activity that is the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) (Leung & Mohan, 2004). Teachers often fail to interact with students in a way that systematically promotes development. Even when FA is more systematic, it is generally aimed at supporting learner performance (i.e., scaffolding) during a specific task rather than at long term development (Leung & Mohan, 2004). This then is the second difference between DA and FA. To be sure, development may emerge from FA, but it is more or less achieved incidentally rather than intentionally. The third difference concerns the contexts in which the procedures are used. FA is generally limited to the classroom setting, and indeed is often contrasted with summative assessment. Feedback and assistance provided during summative assessments is assumed to compromise the reliability and validity of any interpretation of test scores. DA, on the other hand, insists upon the fact that assessment and instruction cannot be segregated, as from this perspective, they form a unity needed for learner development. Consequently, when one changes the focus of assessment from measuring task performance to understanding and improving the abilities underlying the performance, interaction during the ABSTRACT Dynamism pumps the blood to the body of society; therefore, the dynamic and communicative nature of language can not only be considered integral in teaching, but also in assessing a language. Recently, all over the world traditional ways of assessment are trading place with more communicative ones. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate whether dynamic and formative assessment had significantly different impact on improving the listening skills of Iranian EFL Learners. To do so, 90 intermediate male and female learners from a language school in Tehran were elected. A piloted PET was administered as homogeneity test and 60 learners were selected as the participants and randomly assigned into two groups of thirty. To make sure that there is no statistically significant difference between the performances of the two groups in the beginning of the research a listening pretest of PET was administered in both experimental groups. In one group dynamic assessment, through teaching metacognitive strategies, was administered on learners' listening skills, while the other group's listening skill was assessed formatively. After fourteen sessions a posttest of PET was administered for both groups. The evaluation of the findings showed that the dynamically assessed group outperformed the formative one. © 2014 Elixir All rights reserved. Dynamic verses formative assessment: A comparative study Elmira Shahin 1 and Rana Azarizad 2,* 1 Islamic Azad University at Central Tehran, Siyame Iran St., Shahrak-e-Ghods, Tehran, Iran. 2 Iran University of Science and Technology, Hengan St., Resalat Sq., Tehran, Iran. ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received: 7 September 2014; Received in revised form: 27 October 2014; Accepted: 13 November 2014; Keywords Dynamic assessment, Formative assessment, Listening Comprehension, Sociolinguistic theory and ZPD, Metacognitive strategies. Elixir Soc. Sci. 76 (2014) 28483-28486 Social Sciences Available online at www.elixirpublishers.com (Elixir International Journal) Tele: 0098 912 4832954 E-mail addresses: Elmira.shahin@yahoo.com © 2014 Elixir All rights reserved