Publication details
Topic as a resource for action: Candidates' embodied orientations to task prompts during EFL oral proficiency tests
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | Being able to meaningfully contribute to the ongoing interaction constitutes an important subset of L2 interactional competence, which makes this ability a frequent target of assessment during oral proficiency tests (Galaczi & Taylor, 2018). To ensure the validity and reliability of such assessment, however, the test task must elicit performances which are structurally similar, yet which at the same time allow for differentiation in the candidates' ability to manage a topic. This requirement is particularly challenging when designing pair or group discussion tasks in which the topic is co-constructed by candidates in interaction (Gan et al., 2009). Our paper addresses this challenge by detailing the interactional unfolding of how candidates manage a topic based on standardised task prompts. To do so, we draw on Seedhouse's (2018) distinction between "topic-as-script" (the homogenised topic given to candidates by the examiner) and "topic-as-action" (the various ways in which candidates talk a topic into being) and argue that in pair and group discussion tasks, it is the material artefacts–in our case a worksheet with a diagram mapping the discussion topic through a series of topic prompts–that allow to establish a connection between the script and the action. Building on a dataset of 66 video-recorded pair and group EFL oral proficiency tests collected at a university in Czechia, we employ multimodal conversation analysis (Goodwin, 2018) to analyse instances in which candidates transition from one prompt to another. Specifically, we demonstrate how the candidates' embodied orientations to the worksheet provide affordances for displaying their interactional repertoires (Hall, 2018) for closing, initiating, and developing a topic in a manner which is comparable, and hence testable across various performances. These findings contribute to the body of research operationalising the construct of L2 interactional competence for assessment purposes (Galaczi & Taylor, 2018; Malabarba & Betz, 2023). |
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