In recent decades, the field of assessing speaking has seen an increasing emphasis on ‘interaction’. In defining the construct of interactional competence (IC), both the theoretical formulation and empirical evidence suggest that the competence is coconstructed and context-specific. This poses a multitude of conundrums for language testing practitioners and researchers, one of which is the extent to which we can extrapolate candidates’ performance in the target non-testing context from their performance in a test. This thesis considers these questions in the case of the Group Interaction (GI) task in the School-based Assessment (SBA) for the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination (HKDSE). Validation studies on the SBA Group Interaction task to date have generated somewhat contradictory results as to whether the task elicits authentic oral language use. Moreover, studies to date have not compared students’ interactions under different task implementation conditions (such as the amount of preparation time), or have investigated in detail what exactly students do during preparation time and how that might impact on their subsequent assessed interaction. This study explores what kinds of interactional features constitute interactional competence; how IC is co-constructed in discourse, and what complexities there might be in assessing the competence through a group interaction task. It also investigates whether the SBA GI task elicits authentic oral language use, and how the task implementation condition of preparation time might influence the validity of the task. Video-recordings of the assessed group interactions were obtained from two schools, with students given extended preparation time in one school but not the other. The assessed group interactions are analyzed using a Conversation Analytic approach, supplemented by data from mock assessments and stimulated recall interviews with student-candidates and teacher-raters. This study contributes to the construct definition of interactional competence – its components and the specific ways they are performed in discourse. Drawing on findings about students’ overhearer-oriented talk, it also problematizes the assumption that a group interaction task is necessarily eliciting and assessing candidates’ competence for interacting in a peer group only. More specifically to the SBA GI task, this study has produced evidence that group interactions with and without extended preparation time are qualitatively different, and has identified some of the ways in which extended preparation time might compromise the task’s validity in assessing interactional competence.

This dissertation examines the discourse produced by beginning learners of Spanish using social media. Specifically, it looks at the use and development of interactional resources during two video-mediated conversations. Through a combination of Conversation Analysis tools and quantitative data analysis, the use of turn-taking strategies, repair trajectories, and alignment moves was examined to discover how beginning language learners manage videoconferencing exchanges and develop their interactional capabilities in this new interactional setting. The goal of this investigation was twofold: 1) to describe and explain how students construct, manage and maintain conversations via videoconferencing, and 2) to gain a better understanding of the links between technology-based social media and language learning. The results of this study indicate that instructional videoconferencing conversations display their own clearly delimited and idiosyncratic organization of interactional features. In terms of turn-taking, the results of the analyses demonstrate that beginning learners are fully capable of participating competently in speaker selection to manage a conversation with a peer of similar proficiency level. In the area of repair, the analyses show that, during instructional videoconferencing exchanges, beginning learners orient to both the communication of personal meaning and the accuracy of their discourse. They enact this orientation through the use of self-initiated self-repair. Finally, with regard to the use of alignment moves, the analyses reveal that, in tune with their nascent linguistic and interactional abilities, beginning learners use primarily acknowledgement moves.

This dissertation centers on the under-researched construct of interactional competence, which refers to features of jointly constructed discourse. When applied to the testing of speaking skills in a second language, interactional competence refers to features of the discourse that the two students produce together; rather than the speaking ability or performance of each person individually. This dissertation describes the construct of interactional competence in a low-stakes, paired speaking test setting targeted at students in their second year of German instruction at the college level. The purpose of this study is two-fold. First, the study analyzes the conversational resources that are co-constructed in the test discourse to maintain mutual understanding, which is considered the basis for interactional competence. Second, the study examines the impact of task (jigsaw task and discussion task) and speaking ability-level combination (same and different ability) in the test-taker pair on the co-constructed test discourse and thus on the deployment of the conversational resources to maintain intersubjectivity. In that respect, this study also seeks to analyze how the identified conversational resources are involved in establishing and negotiating language ability identities that are displayed in the test discourse. Conversation analytic conventions were used to investigate the interactional resources that test takers deploy to maintain mutual understanding. The procedures of repair (self-repair in response to other-initiated repair, inter-turn delays, and misunderstandings as well as other-repair in conjunction with word search activities) that emerged from the inductive analysis of the test discourse have broadened the conceptualization of interactional competence in the context of paired speaking assessments. Frequency distributions of the interactional resources were created to provide a better understanding of the impact of task and ability-level combination on the co-constructed repair procedures. The rationale behind this analysis is the general understanding of language testers that both resources and context influence test performance. The findings from the quantitative analysis suggest that there are more similarities than differences in repair use across the jigsaw task and the discussion task. In addition, even though some trends in the co-construction of repair procedures may be attributed to the higher or lower speaking ability of the test takers, the relationship between the ability-level combination in the pair and the use of repair seems to be rather variable. Finally, to learn more about the interrelationship between test takers’ speaking ability and interactional competence, this dissertation also approached speaking ability in terms of test takers’ co-constructed language ability identities that are displayed in the test discourse. By means of single case analyses, the study provided a detailed picture of the relationship between language ability identities and the procedures of repair, both of which are co-constructed at the discourse level. The findings from the conversation analysis show that the speaker who provides the repair is usually able to position himself or herself as the more competent or proficient speaker in the test discourse.

A presente dissertação analisa como se configura a Competência Interacional (He; Young, 1998) de aprendizes adultos brasileiros durante um curso de italiano durante conversa espontânea. Os dados foram coletados durante um semestre, com foco em conversas livres, isto é, em interações imprevisíveis, sem duração definida e cujos temas nasciam a partir de algum acontecimento em sala de aula, sem planejamento prévio. A análise dos dados teve dois focos principais: a análise do sistema de turnos e dos reparos, procurando verificar de que forma a construção desses recursos determina aspectos da interação e do desempenho de papeis de professor e de aluno em sala de aula. Os dados foram analisados com base na disciplina, fortemente empírica, da Análise da Conversa; de modo mais específico, foram utilizadas as categorias encontradas por Sacks, Schegloff e Jefferson (1974) e por Schegloff, Jefferson e Sacks (1977), para análise do sistema de turnos e dos reparos, respectivamente. A análise dos dados indicou que os aprendizes utilizaram o sistema de turnos de forma parecida com o da conversa fora da sala de aula, já que na maioria dos casos se auto-selecionam como próximos falantes, o que nos levou a identificar uma postura autônoma e a percepção, por parte dos aprendizes, de um ambiente mais próximo ao genuíno de comunicação. Por outro lado, nota-se que os turnos dos aprendizes têm, quase sempre, menor duração do que os do professor, possivelmente, por causa de uma menor competência linguístico-comunicativa. Os dados evidenciam ainda, que os alunos utilizam pouco, muito menos que o professor, a seleção de um outro falante. Quanto à análise do sistema de reparos, verificaram-se duas tendências principais. Em primeiro lugar, os alunos, frequentemente, pedem para ser corrigidos, mas, ao mesmo tempo, há muitas ocorrências em que eles não esperam que alguém responda a esses pedidos e continuam a conversa. Em segundo lugar, o professor, na maioria dos casos, não corrige os desvios linguísticos dos alunos e, quando o faz, não parece existir uma lógica que guie essas ações. Se olharmos com mais atenção para os dados analisados, configura-se uma situação complexa, em que os alunos, por exemplo, corrigem outros alunos, ou em que eles interrompem o professor. Em conclusão, a detalhada análise das interações evidencia que, em vários momentos, os papeis de professor e alunos estão bem marcados, mas estão longe de ser os papeis tradicionais em que o professor é quem avaliava e distribui os turnos, e os alunos estão em posição mais passiva. Isso nos permite afirmar que a conversa é uma atividade de sala de aula em que os participantes têm liberdade de ação e na qual os recursos interacionais são aspectos essenciais não apenas na configuração da interação, como também na construção da competência interacional dos aprendizes e na compreensão do processo de ensino-aprendizagem de línguas em sala de aula. / This study analyzes the nature of Interactional Competence (He; Young, 1998) of adult Brazilian learners, attending a Italian language course, during spontaneous conversation. The data, collected during a semester, focused on unplanned conversations, which had no defined duration and whose topics emerged from anything occurring in the classroom. The analysis of the data consists of two main foci: speaker selection and repairs. They were analyzed in order to verify how their construction could determine aspects of interaction and how it influences the roles that the professor and the learners play in the classroom. The data were analyzed based on the, strictly empirical, discipline of Conversation Analysis; in particular, were used the categories found by Sacks, Schegloff e Jefferson (1974), and Schegloff, Jefferson e Sacks (1977), for speaker selection and repair, respectively. The analysis of the data revealed that the learners use speaker selection in a way that similar to that outside classroom, that is to say, they mainly selected themselves in order to take the floor. This learners skill is viewed as evidence of autonomous stance; furthermore, it indicates that they perceive the classroom as characterized by genuine communication. On the other hand, it can be noticed that learners turns are mainly shorter than professors, probably due to their lesser linguistic-communicative competence. In addition, the data show that the learners select the other participants fewer times than the teacher. Examination of the system of repairs revealed two main trends. Firstly, in spite of the fact that the learners frequently ask for a linguistic repair, they frequently do not wait for somebody to realize that repair and keep on speaking. Secondly, the teacher, in most of the cases, does not repair the learners linguistic problems and when it occurs, the fact does not seem to be supported by any underlying logic. At a closer look, the data show a complex situation in which the learners use the other-repair resource or interrupt the teacher. Finally, the detailed conversation analysis shows that even though many times the roles teacher and learners play are well defined, they are not even close to the traditional ones in which the teacher used to evaluate and distribute the turns, and the learners had a passive attitude. The analysis serve as evidence to affirm that conversation is a classroom activity in which students can perform freely and in which the interactional resources are aspects essential, not only to better understand and categorize the interaction, but also to the construction of the learners interactional competence and for the understanding of the foreign language classroom teaching process.

A presente dissertação analisa como se configura a Competência Interacional (He; Young, 1998) de aprendizes adultos brasileiros durante um curso de italiano durante conversa espontânea. Os dados foram coletados durante um semestre, com foco em conversas livres, isto é, em interações imprevisíveis, sem duração definida e cujos temas nasciam a partir de algum acontecimento em sala de aula, sem planejamento prévio. A análise dos dados teve dois focos principais: a análise do sistema de turnos e dos reparos, procurando verificar de que forma a construção desses recursos determina aspectos da interação e do desempenho de papeis de professor e de aluno em sala de aula. Os dados foram analisados com base na disciplina, fortemente empírica, da Análise da Conversa; de modo mais específico, foram utilizadas as categorias encontradas por Sacks, Schegloff e Jefferson (1974) e por Schegloff, Jefferson e Sacks (1977), para análise do sistema de turnos e dos reparos, respectivamente. A análise dos dados indicou que os aprendizes utilizaram o sistema de turnos de forma parecida com o da conversa fora da sala de aula, já que na maioria dos casos se auto-selecionam como próximos falantes, o que nos levou a identificar uma postura autônoma e a percepção, por parte dos aprendizes, de um ambiente mais próximo ao genuíno de comunicação. Por outro lado, nota-se que os turnos dos aprendizes têm, quase sempre, menor duração do que os do professor, possivelmente, por causa de uma menor competência linguístico-comunicativa. Os dados evidenciam ainda, que os alunos utilizam pouco, muito menos que o professor, a seleção de um outro falante. Quanto à análise do sistema de reparos, verificaram-se duas tendências principais. Em primeiro lugar, os alunos, frequentemente, pedem para ser corrigidos, mas, ao mesmo tempo, há muitas ocorrências em que eles não esperam que alguém responda a esses pedidos e continuam a conversa. Em segundo lugar, o professor, na maioria dos casos, não corrige os desvios linguísticos dos alunos e, quando o faz, não parece existir uma lógica que guie essas ações. Se olharmos com mais atenção para os dados analisados, configura-se uma situação complexa, em que os alunos, por exemplo, corrigem outros alunos, ou em que eles interrompem o professor. Em conclusão, a detalhada análise das interações evidencia que, em vários momentos, os papeis de professor e alunos estão bem marcados, mas estão longe de ser os papeis tradicionais em que o professor é quem avaliava e distribui os turnos, e os alunos estão em posição mais passiva. Isso nos permite afirmar que a conversa é uma atividade de sala de aula em que os participantes têm liberdade de ação e na qual os recursos interacionais são aspectos essenciais não apenas na configuração da interação, como também na construção da competência interacional dos aprendizes e na compreensão do processo de ensino-aprendizagem de línguas em sala de aula. / This study analyzes the nature of Interactional Competence (He; Young, 1998) of adult Brazilian learners, attending a Italian language course, during spontaneous conversation. The data, collected during a semester, focused on unplanned conversations, which had no defined duration and whose topics emerged from anything occurring in the classroom. The analysis of the data consists of two main foci: speaker selection and repairs. They were analyzed in order to verify how their construction could determine aspects of interaction and how it influences the roles that the professor and the learners play in the classroom. The data were analyzed based on the, strictly empirical, discipline of Conversation Analysis; in particular, were used the categories found by Sacks, Schegloff e Jefferson (1974), and Schegloff, Jefferson e Sacks (1977), for speaker selection and repair, respectively. The analysis of the data revealed that the learners use speaker selection in a way that similar to that outside classroom, that is to say, they mainly selected themselves in order to take the floor. This learners skill is viewed as evidence of autonomous stance; furthermore, it indicates that they perceive the classroom as characterized by genuine communication. On the other hand, it can be noticed that learners turns are mainly shorter than professors, probably due to their lesser linguistic-communicative competence. In addition, the data show that the learners select the other participants fewer times than the teacher. Examination of the system of repairs revealed two main trends. Firstly, in spite of the fact that the learners frequently ask for a linguistic repair, they frequently do not wait for somebody to realize that repair and keep on speaking. Secondly, the teacher, in most of the cases, does not repair the learners linguistic problems and when it occurs, the fact does not seem to be supported by any underlying logic. At a closer look, the data show a complex situation in which the learners use the other-repair resource or interrupt the teacher. Finally, the detailed conversation analysis shows that even though many times the roles teacher and learners play are well defined, they are not even close to the traditional ones in which the teacher used to evaluate and distribute the turns, and the learners had a passive attitude. The analysis serve as evidence to affirm that conversation is a classroom activity in which students can perform freely and in which the interactional resources are aspects essential, not only to better understand and categorize the interaction, but also to the construction of the learners interactional competence and for the understanding of the foreign language classroom teaching process.

Comment peut-on être policier ? C'est à cette question que tente de répondre cette thèse qui se propose d'analyser à la fois les processus de construction de l'attrait pour le métier de gardien de la paix et les modalités de la sélection des candidats. Elle s'intéresse d'abord aux droits d'entrée dont doivent s'acquitter les candidats. Bien que la nature et le « montant » de ces droits d'entrée fassent l'objet d'une définition officielle, le jugement des gatekeepersde l'institution est, en pratique, inapte à garantir la conformité des recrues auxexigences spécifiques du poste. En ce sens, les opérations de recrutement paraissent constituer un moment critique pour la stabilité de l'institution. Les processus qui conduisent à l'émergence et à la consolidation d'une vocation policière ont cependant pour effet de fabriquer des candidats biens disposés à l'égard de l'institution, prêts à se rendre compatibles. Ainsi, la police nationale constitue moins l'objet d'étude que le terrain d'investigation de cette thèse, qui propose une contribution à l'analyse des processus de reproduction des institutions engagées dans la mise en oeuvre de l'action publique. / How can one be a police constable ? This thesis tries to answer this question by analysing the building process of attraction to police jobs and the procedures for selecting the candidates. It deals first with the entrance fee candidates must pay. Although the nature and the amount of this fee is officially defined, the sentence pronounced by the gate-keepers of the institution is, in fact, unable to ensure the compatility of the recruits with the requirements of the position. Recruitment actions can be seen, therefore, as a critical moment for the stability of the institution. However, the rise and consolidation of the vocation for police jobs make candidates socially prepared to comply with the institution.The police is more the inquiry field than the object of this thesis, that propounds a contribution to the analysis of the reproduction of institutions involved in public policy.