Oral English performance in Danish primary school children: An interactional usage-based approach

Abstract

Following the call in Sandlund, Sundqvist, and Nyroos (2016) for incorporating discursive approaches into the field of oral second language (L2) testing, this paper proposes an interactional usage-based approach to the analysis of oral L2 performance. Based on Eskildsen (2018a), we combine analytic tools from usage-based linguistics and conversation analysis. We draw on usage-based linguistics to analyze performance in terms of test-takers’ inventories of linguistic constructions and on conversation analysis to understand their interactional competence in terms of the relation between the linguistic constructions and the actions they are used to accomplish. Performance assessment is thus constructional and interactional. Participants in this pilot study were two Danish primary school children who performed two consecutive oral tasks: a semi-guided interview and a picture-elicited narrative task. Data were analyzed by means of cross-child comparisons and cross-task comparisons within each child. Our data confirm the observation from previous research that simple question-answer(-assessment) sequences dominate oral test formats, but also that the format is sometimes abandoned, which allows for the accomplishment of new social actions. Moreover, the picture-description task affords a different speech exchange system with the interviewer participating more as an active listener when the children do not voluntarily carry out the requested task.

Accumulating Semiotic Resources for Social Actions: A Case Study of L2 Icelandic in the Wild

“…Specifically, we call for increased educational awareness of interactional competence and the insight from interactional linguistics that what we know as language is, ultimately, a set of constructions for accomplishing social action. This corroborates the accumulating work toward formulating principled ways of organizing L2 teaching and carrying out L2 assessment around interactional competence (Eskildsen & Cadierno, 2020; Hall, 2018; Huth, 2020; Roever & Kasper, 2018; Salaberry & Kunitz, 2019; Youn, 2015). L2 speakers need to learn how to navigate socially in and through the L2 in recognizable ways.…”

Emergent L2 Grammars in and for Social Interaction: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…The Modern Language Journal 106 (2022) Implications for L2 Education Based on their findings, each contribution outlines avenues for L2 education. Cumulatively, they lead to the following set of considerations: The studies give further empirical impetus to current discussions on interactionally oriented L2 assessment and testing research (Eskildsen & Cadierno, 2020;Roever & Kasper, 2018;Salaberry & Kunitz, 2019;Sandlund et al, 2016) that seeks to treat linguistic and interactional competences in an integrated way. The studies feed into current concerns with how the empirical findings of the type of research reported here can be brought to bear on the classroom, regarding, for instance, initiatives that seek to bring students' real-world experiences back into the classroom for reflection and teaching purposes (Lilja & Piirainen-Marsh, 2019).…”