Pursuing a relevant response in oral proficiency interview role plays

Oral proficiency interviews (OPIs) make use of a variety of tasks to collect and evaluate ratable speech samples from test candidates, including interviewer-led question and answer tasks, news-telling tasks, and role-play tasks. Conscious of the real-world consequences that these tests hold, OPI administrators make every effort to standardize the assessment procedure by creating detailed testing manuals and conducting extensive tester training. Even so, inevitably problems in understanding and speaking do occur in OPI interaction, and are dealt with locally through the repair organization common to all interaction (Kasper & Ross, 2003, 2007). If the manner of handling these problems were to vary from interviewer to interviewer, the reliability of the test could be threatened (Lazaraton, 1996). At the same time, attributing the source of the trouble solely to the candidate’s lack of language ability instead of, for example, such interviewer-related causes as clumsy question construction, could lead to the assigning of a lower proficiency rating than would be justified (see Ross & Berwick, 1992). Studying the way interviewers manage interactional trouble is therefore essential, since it can shed light on how the practices of repair affect interviewing procedures and the construction of the candidate’s performance.