Role exchange as an interactional practice to maintain progressivity in paired role-play interactional competence assessment tasks

Abstract Assessing interactional competence (IC) in second/additional/foreign languages (L2) is increasingly becoming a primary construct to examine the interactional ability of language learners, which calls for assessment contexts that provide opportunities for mutually managing interactions. This study focuses on paired role-play tasks as the assessment context and investigates the systematic methods deployed by L2 learners to collaboratively accomplish the progressivity of task-oriented assessment conversations. Using Multimodal Conversation Analysis as the research methodology, we examine video-recorded paired role-play interactions and specifically deal with how L2 learners topicalize the instructed social actions and engage in role-exchange to ensure progressivity. Relatedly, the findings show that the participants skilfully switch their pre-assigned roles when they identify or pre-empt troubles in progressivity, which, in return, enables them to move the assessment task and talk-in-interaction forward, thus bearing relevance for a situated understanding of the participants’ displays of IC. The findings bring new insights into L2 IC assessment.