Transitioning between Task Prompts during EFL Oral Proficiency Exams
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | This presentation focuses on how university English as a foreign language (EFL) students orient to task prompts in a paired or grouped speaking task during an oral proficiency exam. Although students are supposed to cooperate during the task and arrive at a mutual decision, and although the rating criteria for exams such as those within the Cambridge English Qualifications include a category seemingly related to the concept of interactional competence (Hall and Pekarek Doehler 2011), the assessment is usually based primarily on the quality of a candidate’s monologue while dialogic and interactional abilities are overlooked (e.g. Galaczi and Taylor 2018). Recent years have therefore seen attempts to describe various manifestations of learners’ interactional competence in the oral assessment setting with the aim to distinguish interactional features across various levels of proficiency and thus contribute towards the creation of rating scales which would better reflect natural interaction. While there have been studies considering participants’ multimodal conduct, mainly in relation to gaze (e.g. Burch and Kley 2020; Lam 2021) or gestures (Gan and Davison 2011), there are so far no studies investigating the way material resources such as task prompts contribute to the complex multimodal gestalts (Mondada 2018) that underlie participants’ actions in this context. 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. By employing the method of multimodal Conversation Analysis, I investigate various instances in which students orient to the task prompts and move from one discussion item to the next. A preliminary analysis of the data suggests differences in the ways transitions from one prompt to another are managed by higher- and lower-scoring students. The above analysed excerpt is demonstrative of less proficient students who have been found to 1) concentrate on the worksheet profusely, 2) frequently adopt the language of the prompts into their syntax, and 3) focus on progressivity, transitioning to new task prompts without properly addressing the ones raised by their colleagues (cf. Lam 2018). More proficient students, on the other hand, orient to the prompts much less frequently, transitioning to a new item only after discussing the previous one in more depth. The discussed findings expand our understanding of interactional competence and its development, particularly in relation to handling material objects in joint interactional projects such as paired or grouped speaking tasks based on lists and other forms of prompts. |
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