The Assessment of Oracy in the EFL Classroom: Introducing a Conversation-Analytic Method for Evaluating Interactional Skills

Communication, in particular face-to-face interaction, is a complex and thus challenging matter. If foreign language teachers want to enable their learners to accomplish it successfully in the target language, they need to hone their pupils’ interactional competence (IC), that is, their ability to start, maintain, and close talk-in-interaction in such a way that they can accomplish social actions and pursue interactional objectives. This contribution highlights both the components of IC and what makes assessing them so challenging. At the same time, it proposes a conversation-analytically inspired approach to assessing IC and discusses how that approach is currently being taught to pre-service teachers in interdisciplinary master’s level courses at Potsdam University, Germany. A sample analysis of the repair skills displayed by one learner of English as a foreign language in a German secondary school illustrates the approach.