Assessing Speaking in Context: Expanding the Construct and Its Applications

This edited volume investigates the nature and possible applications of an expanded and reconceptualized theoretical construct of speaking as a dynamic socially-constructed endeavour. It addresses both theoretical perspectives and methodological procedures to define and circumscribe the assessment of contextualized speaking. The chapters focus on the complexity brought about by actual interactional competence in speaking tasks and discuss how testing and assessment models and practices can incorporate recent research findings on the inherently dynamic and situated nature of language use. The volume presents research on language assessment in a variety of languages other than English, including French, Chinese and Japanese. It also examines the role that embodied action (gaze, gesture, orientation to materials and texts in the environment) plays in assessment practices, an area that has heretofore remained under-explored.

Chapter 6 is free to download as an open access publication under a CC BY NC ND licence. You can access it here: https://zenodo.org/record/5163340#.YQvJ0IhKjcs

M. Rafael Salaberry is Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Humanities at Rice University, USA. His research interests include second language acquisition and use, multilingualism, bilingual education, assessment and teaching methodology. Together with S. Kunitz, he is the co-editor of Teaching and Testing Interactional Competence: Bridging Theory and Practice (2019, Routledge).

Alfred Rue Burch is an Associate Professor at Kobe University, Japan. His research interests include conversation analysis, discursive psychology, second language acquisition and use, and task-based language teaching and testing.