Preliminaries are prefatory turns and sequences that are used to alert co-participants to the incipient social actions in talk-in-interaction. Using multimodal conversation analysis, this study examines the videorecordings of paired role play interactions in an L2 interactional competence (L2IC) assessment setting. We describe how the participants…

The use of group-based, task-oriented, peer interaction formats in classroom and public L2 speaking tests has grown in recent years. However, these assessments have received comparatively little attention when compared to other formats such as the oral proficiency interview (OPI). In order to better understand the local exigencies of this…

This paper examines classroom discourse from English lessons that implemented a critical literacy unit focused on a contextualised social issue. Utilising the theoretical notion of frame, the analysis of classroom excerpts highlights how ideologies about English teaching and learning at times enter the discourse of the classes, not only overtly…

In formal assessments of second-language speakers' fluency, the criteria used frequently fail to differentiate between real disfluency and interactionally effective practices, while superficially disfluent, that help with communication and are used by first language speakers. In this study, we focused on pausing, silences and self-repairs in the…

While disagreements are often considered dispreferred choices and potentially face-threatening acts due to their oppositional nature, this perception does not adequately reflect the importance of disagreeing for many types of interaction, such as problem-solving and decision-making. Developing ability in performing this speech act therefore…