“I agree but” : performing less than agreement during L2 oral proficiency tests
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | While high-stakes language oral proficiency tests such as IELTS or B2 First regularly contain rating criteria related to coherence in talk-in-interaction, what this means regarding candidates’ ability to link their own talk to preceding utterances is not sufficiently captured in the assessment criteria (Lam 2018; 2021). Drawing on multimodal transcriptions (Mondada 2018) of 43 video-recorded paired and group English as a foreign language oral proficiency tests, we focus on instances in which students perform less than agreement (Sacks, 1984) with the opinions produced by their peers in the preceding turns. Using multimodal conversation analysis (Goodwin 2013) and focusing on a subcollection of 18 cases, we investigate the sequential unfolding of less than agreement and demonstrate that there are differences in how it is managed by higher- and lower-scoring students. In designing their potentially facethreatening acts, higher-scoring students are usually able to use various linguistic and embodied resources to hedge their response in a manner that is contingent on the preceding turn. Lower-scoring students, on the other hand, seem to instead rely on formulaic expressions such as “I agree” which fail to signal the upcoming less than agreement and result in the students contradicting themselves. Based on our findings we argue that the way less than agreement is managed in interaction constitutes a possible teachable and testable and thus furthers our understanding of how interactional competence (Pekarek Doehler 2018) can be taught and assessed. |
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