The use of pair work in speaking assessment may encourage collaboration in the classroom and has other advantages (Saville & Hargreaves, 1999; Taylor, 2000) but from a measurement perspective, the paired oral format may be problematic because a partner may unfairly influence an examinee's performance or otherwise bias scores. In this study,…

This study, framed within sociocultural theory, examines the interaction of adult ESL test-takers in two tests of oral proficiency: one in which they interacted with an examiner (the individual format) and one in which they interacted with another student (the paired format). The data for the eight pairs in this study were drawn from a larger…