Reconceptualising interactional competence for language testing

Abstract

There has recently been strong interest in the assessment of interactional competence (IC) as witnessed by a special issue of the journal Language Testing (Plough et al., 2018) devoted entirely to IC, a special issue on the employment of conversation analysis in assessing IC of the journal Papers in Language Testing Assessment (Youn & Burch, 2020) and the prominent role of IC assessment in the special issue of the journal Language Assessment Quarterly on speaking assessment (Lim, 2018). However, to this date no major language test assesses IC, and this chapter is intended to contribute to ending this lamentable state of affairs. We will do so by discussing why the absence of IC assessment is..