Dai, David Wei; (2025) Assessment of Interactional Competence. In: Chapelle, Carol A, (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. (pp. 1-7). Wiley

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Abstract

Interactional Competence (IC) describes a language user's ability to interact with others in real‐world contexts that have rich social, cultural, and interpersonal cues. The notion of IC has attracted particular interest from language assessment researchers since existing speaking tests tend to focus on discrete linguistic abilities such as grammar and vocabulary while how these abilities are used for real‐world interpersonal communication is less emphasized. This entry discusses how an IC test construct can be defined, drawing on IC's constructivist epistemology and methodologies in Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorization Analysis. I present three current approaches to IC rubric development: the discourse approach, the synthesis approach, and the universal approach. As to IC task development, I first discuss what dialogic and monologic tasks can offer to IC assessment. This is followed by explaining two principled approaches to IC task development: the IC‐additive approach and the IC‐centered approach. There is a discussion on the value of needs analysis for developing IC tasks that are meaningful to test users. This entry concludes with three future research directions for IC assessment: (a) developing and validating more comprehensive IC constructs that cover the sequential, emotional, logical, moral, and categorial dimensions of IC; (b) investigating to what extent IC is influenced by general language proficiency and if IC is an ability that both L2 and L1 speakers need to be taught and assessed on; (c) exploring what technological advances such as artificial intelligence can offer to make IC assessment more accessible, especially to test‐takers of disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds.

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