2023 Volume 26 Pages 3-22
According to a large-scale survey administered by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan, in 2021, interview tests wherein students speak with a teacher or an assistant language teacher are mainly used in Japanese junior high schools to assess interactional competence in speaking English. However, there has been a lack of investigation regarding the types of utterances elicited by students during interview tests conducted by teachers. This study aimed to fill this gap by involving a teacher who interviewed 41 junior high school students, allowing for a holistic and analytical examination of the dialogues during the interviews. The analysis of these student-teacher dialogues revealed that the teacher actively assisted students in continuing the dialogue by offering new topics, developing them, and asking topic-related questions to continue the dialogue. The authors argue that these findings indicate that the interviews demonstrated the teacher's interactional competence more than that of the students, making it difficult to assess students' interactional competence through teacherconducted interviews. Therefore, alternative speaking-test formats are needed to assess the students' interactional competence in English.
