A sequential analysis of task entering practices in paired role-play tasks

Assessment of L2 learners' interactional competence (IC) as part of oral proficiency has recently increased since the understanding of L2 speaking has been expanded with social-situational language use. L2 oral proficiency assessment studies have attempted to define what entails IC construct and to provide evidence to its unfolding across different assessment settings including oral proficiency interviews, group/pair discussions, and role-plays. However, there is still scant evidence to what entails IC since previous research has focused on limited interactional setting (e.g., L2 requests, Al-Gahtani & Roever, 2012; L2 refusals, Al- Gahtani and Roever, 2018) and practices (e.g., topic management, Galaczi, 2014; Kley, 2019). Examining 49 paired role-play interactions with conversation analysis (CA), this study investigates how test takers initiate telling their unfulfilled childhood dreams. The findings show that test takers either project their telling through preliminaries (n = 38) or directly launch (n = 11) their telling. Further investigation demonstrates that the test takers transform the initiation of paired role-plays into a collaborative interactional event even when the telling of a childhood dream is directly launched. Additionally, the test takers draw on a variety of preliminary sources that are sequentially consequential, namely pre-pre sequences, pre-question sequences, pre-telling sequences, and story prefaces. Varying practices at the task entrance imply that assessment protocols should start within the task initiation phase and that preliminaries as a defining feature of IC can be used within such moments for scoring. For this purpose, an evidence-based rubric built on the test takers' observed practices are offered. Keywords: interactional competence assessment, conversation analysis, role plays, preliminaries