‘I agree but’: Performing less-than-agreement during EFL oral proficiency exams

This study deals with L2 interactional competence (L2 IC) and its assessment in pair and group test interactions. When developing and using rubrics for the assessment of L2 IC, language testers and raters face the issue of having to assign separate scores to what is essentially a jointly constructed examinee performance. Driven by conversation analysis as a method for analysing social actions, recent advances in the field have shown that a solution to the problem may lie in a thick description of the various L2 interactional practices and resources that examinees draw on when performing social actions in alternative ways. We contribute to this endeavour by investigating how examinees accomplish the social action of disagreeing with their partners' preceding turn. To do so, we draw on multimodal transcriptions of 66 video-recorded pair and group EFL oral proficiency tests conducted in a higher education setting in Czechia. Employing multimodal conversation analysis, we investigate the sequential unfolding of disagreements and demonstrate that they can be classified into three distinct types based on the semiotic (verbal, prosodic, temporal, embodied) resources employed to both signal and mitigate the incoming dissent. We argue that the design of disagreements constitutes rich ground for examining a learner's active listenership, and hence their L2 IC. Such findings have implications for rater training, construction of assessment rubrics, design of L2 discussion tasks as well as for the teaching of L2 IC in general.