Pursuing a ‘writeable’ response in L2 oral placement tests: examiners’ recipient design practices on the same topic with multiple test takers

Language education institutions world-wide regularly use Oral Placement Tests (OPTs) to diagnose test-takers’ second language (L2) accuracy and fluency to place them in the most appropriate class. Despite their widespread use, there are very few studies into the ways OPTs unfold. This study draws on a corpus of 26 video-recorded OPTs at a language institution in the UK. In these OPTs, examiners are given test sheets that contain various topics that they use to initiate a series of question-answer sequences that are followed by the examiner creating a written record of the test-taker’s answer. Successfully achieving these sequences requires the examiner to carefully design their turns to meet with the abilities of each test-taker. We contend that designing turns that are appropriate for multiple test-takers of varying levels during first encounters is a considerable professional challenge facing examiners. By examining interactions stemming from the same test-sheet topic (i.e. job/study) across multiple OPTs using multimodal conversation analysis, this study reveals the ways examiners achieve mutual understanding and ultimately accomplish the institutional goal of completing part of the test-sheet. This contributes to explorations of L2 Interactional Competence in an under-researched testing setting.