Role Exchange as an Interactional Resource for Maintaining Progressivity in Role-Play Interactional Competence Assessment Tasks in L2 English

Abstract

Assessment of L2 interactional competence has undergone scrutiny in recent decades with the increasing attention directed to social facets of the process. While oral proficiency interviews have been largely investigated regarding their potential and validity to assess L2 IC, the nature of role-play tasks has remained uncovered. On this account, this study significantly contributes to the literature by addressing the noticeable gap relevant to the examinations of role-play tasks and interactants’ displays of their L2 IC in this context. The present study aims to explore the ways the participants operationalize their IC repertoires to accomplish activities in a roleplay task and focuses on a specific interactional practice deployed in due course. The data for this study were collected through audio and video-recordings and the participants were the first year ELT students taking the Oral Communication Skills course. Using Multimodal Conversation Analysis and following unmotivated looking procedures, role exchange was discovered to be a recurrent interactional practice in this context. The turn-by-turn analysis of the dataset revealed that role exchange was mutually used by the pairs as an interactional resource to maintain progressivity of interaction. Additionally, the relevant practice was sequentially organized in two distinct patterns: to resolve an interactional trouble halting the progress of ongoing talk and following closure and task completion implicative sequences. The findings provide critical implications for assessing L2 IC in paired role-play settings and rater training on the issue.