Collaborative turn construction in paired speaking tests across different proficiency levels

ABSTRACT

To be able to assess interactional competence (IC), which believed to be shared knowledge rather than an individual skill, talk in paired speaking tests can be analyzed. Accordingly, this study investigates how L2 speakers of English collaboratively construct turns in paired speaking tests mainly through embodied word search sequences and their relation to IC based on a dataset of 48 recorded paired speaking tests collected from a state university in Turkey. Results of the study have revealed that turn completion is mostly constructed at word level but also at sentence level for some cases. It is shown that collaborative turn construction practices vary across different proficiency levels, especially between B1 and B2. In addition to this, there are six different resources employed by interactants to receive turn completion and the higher the students’ proficiency level is, the more varied the resources they use to do so. It is also revealed that interactants almost always achieve mutual understanding following a turn completion. Findings of the study can feed into L2 assessment practices and pedagogical practices in L2 classrooms in a way that can facilitate the teaching of L2 IC.

KEYWORDS:

• Conversation analysis
• oral proficiency assessment
• paired speaking tests
• L2 IC
• collaborative completions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Mutual understanding and intersubjectivity will be used interchangeably in the present study.

Additional information

Funding

This work was not supported by any foundation.

Notes on contributors

Merve Hırçın-Çoban

Merve Hırçın-Çoban works as an instructor at the Department of Basic English at Middle East Technical University (METU). She is a PhD candidate at the Department of English Language Teaching Program at METU. She is mainly interested in conversation analytic and corpus-based investigation of classroom interaction and interaction in paired or group L2 oral assessment.

Betül Çimenli

Betül Çimenli works as a research assistant at the Department of Foreign Language Education at Bartın University (Turkey). She is a PhD candidate at Foreign Language Education Program at Middle East Technical University (METU), Turkey. Her research interests involve investigating face-to-face and online interaction via conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis from various environments including classroom discourse and dyadic online conversations.