Abstract Engagement is an established, observable construct for the assessment of L2 interactional competence ( Ikeda, 2017 , 2021 ; Youn, 2013 , 2020b ). Concurrently, the multimodal nature of interactional competence has become a growing concern in assessing L2 interactional competence with research showing that test raters attend to non-verbal resources such as gaze as indices of performance even when scoring rubrics do not include criteria for multimodality. The current study investigates the roles gaze and nodding play in face-to-face L2 oral English assessment roleplays as components of sequences of actions that empirically distinguish performance levels. The data are video-recorded and transcribed oral English tests conducted at a large US research university. The study draws on multimodal conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. The analysis reveals that higher performing learners use combinations of gaze, nodding, particles, and linguistic constructions to do engagement, and gaze shifts while expressing sympathy, between turn constructional units, and during self-repair. Lower performing test takers also draw on gaze and possibly nodding and particles to do engagement, but their gaze shifts are usually more frequent, prolonged, and occur during turn constructional units. The findings have implications for test developers, rater trainers, and researchers in second language assessment and pragmatics.
Looney et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
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