Task openings during EFL oral proficiency exams : a focus on topic organisation
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | My analysis builds on the dataset of video-recordings featuring 44 paired or grouped interactions between Czech university EFL students who are taking an oral proficiency exam that follows the B2 First format (assessment criteria included). By employing the method of multimodal Conversation Analysis, I investigate the variety and complexity of both verbal and multimodal resources employed by students of various final test score to initiate the collaborative task and develop it into a fully-fledged discussion. The findings have revealed that a successful task initiation is largely dependent on two factors: 1) the complexity of resources used by a student to formulate the first discussion topic or a question and to relinquish the floor afterwards, and 2) the other student(s)’ ability to produce a contingent first response. Regarding 1), the first turns of higher-scoring students are generally shorter, more frequently accompanied by gazing at the co-participants to monitor their recipiency and to signal a potential transition-relevance place (Goodwin, 1981), and concluded by an opinion-seeking question (e.g. “what do you think?”, see e.g. Balen et al., 2022). As for 2), while higher-scoring students are able to follow up on the first turn by paraphrasing, summarising, or in other ways extending the previous contribution (cf. Lam, 2018), their lower-scoring peers orient extensively to the task prompts instead, opening a new topic without addressing the previous one. The discussed findings expand our understanding of the construct of interactional competence and its development, particularly in relation to topic management and recipient design, and have the potential to inform future oral assessment practices. |
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