The Role of Gazing Behaviors in Navigating Paired Role-Play Interactional Competence Assessment Tasks

This paper deals with an end-of-semester interactional competence (IC) assessment of L2 oral communication skills for higher education students. Despite the growing research interest in L2 IC assessment using paired role-play tasks, the non-verbal actions of the learners in these contexts remain largely unexplored. With this in mind, this study uses multimodal Conversation Analysis to examine gazing at role-cards in orienting to, structuring, and navigating through the assessment situations, and displaying IC by attending to task initiation, asking/giving task-relevant details, eliciting/making/delaying offers, and ending the conversation. The findings bring new insights into multimodal aspects of L2 IC assessment.