The collaborative management of interaction in multiparty, second language, oral assessment tasks

Abstract

In the last 50 years, the number of students opting to study at a university outside of their country of citizenship has risen significantly, with the vast majority choosing to study in English-speaking countries, such as the UK, Australia, the USA, and Canada (Wingate, 2014). For some of these students, English is their L1; however, for a significant number, English is instead their second (or even third or fourth) language. It is often the case, however, that students in this latter category do not meet the relevant academic and/or language proficiency requirements for direct entry to their university of choice. Therefore, it has become increasingly commonplace for many international students with English as an L2 to first enrol on programmes at university-affiliated Higher Education (HE) institutes before progressing to their chosen degrees. On these programmes, which can last from as little as six weeks up to a full academic year, students typically take classes in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) alongside lectures and seminars related specifically to their intended degree subjects. The objective on such programmes is to help students achieve the relevant academic and language proficiency scores they need to progress to the partner university. An important part of this process, in terms of EAP provision, involves the assessment of students’ speaking skills in end-of-term tests, which have increasingly taken the form of group-based tasks (designed to better reflect the interactional demands of a university seminar than, say, an oral proficiency interview), in which test-takers must collaborate to solve a problem, reach a consensus, or discuss a topic of contemporary importance. However, how test-takers collaboratively manage interaction in this type of HE assessment setting remains comparatively under-researched. As such, the current study uses Conversation Analysis (CA) to exam how L2 test takers, in these group-based, oral assessments at a university-affiliated HE institute in the UK, co-manage interaction to ensure timely, equitable task completion. My analyses focus on how test-takers coordinate their talk-in-interaction when attending to three salient, recurring aspects of task management. These are: (1) the maintenance of progressivity, (2) the management of affiliation during disagreement sequences, and (3) the negotiation of deontic rights. Findings demonstrate the complex interactional work involved in each of the above and from this some pedagogical implications and possible contributions to assessment are discussed. This study adds to the body of L2 oral assessment research by redressing an imbalance between paired (whether examiner-examinee or examinee-examinee) and group-based assessments, in which the former has received greater attention. Furthermore, the current study expands the scope of research on group-based L2 oral assessment formats by analysing how such assessment tasks are interactionally managed in a hitherto underexplored HE setting. The current study also sheds light on how L2 learners manage ‘convergent’ tasks (that is, tasks that require learners to solve a problem or reach a consensus), which have received comparatively little attention when compared to the more pervasively researched ‘divergent’ task type (e.g., debates).