Webinar: Assessing L2 pragmatics and interactional competence

For the 6th installment of our Innovations in Language Assessment webinar series, we welcome University of Melbourne Professor Dr. Carsten Roever!

Research on assessment of L2 interactional competence (IC) has seen rapid growth in recent years, having effectively superseded work on assessment of L2 pragmatics. In his talk, Dr. Roever traces the paradigm shift from L2 pragmatics to L2 IC assessment, and the current broadening of the construct within L2 IC assessment. He then outlines how L2 IC assessment is crucial for closing an emerging credibility gap in language testing and discuss some significant obstacles to a greater integration of L2 IC assessment in small and large scale language tests. These obstacles include the epistemological chasm between much of IC work informed by conversation analysis and language testing work informed by psychometrics, practicality challenges when integrating resource-intensive IC tasks in language tests, the question of value add of IC for language testing and others. He proposes some possible approaches to overcoming these issues and close on a cautiously (or perhaps foolishly) optimistic note.