Interviewer variation and the co-construction of speaking proficiency

Whilst claims to validity for conversational oral interviews as measures of nontest conversational skills are based largely on the unpredictable or impromptu nature of the test interaction, ironically this very feature is also likely to lead to a lack of standardisation across interviews, and hence potential unfairness. This article addresses the question of variation amongst interviewers in the ways they elicit demonstrations of communicative ability and the impact of this variation on candidate performance and, hence, raters’ perceptions of candidate ability. Through a discourse analysis of two interviews involving the same candidate with two different interviewers, it illustrates how intimately the interviewer is implicated in the construction of candidate proficiency. The interviewers differed with respect to the ways in which they structured sequences of topical talk, their questioning techniques, and the type of feedback they provided. An analysis of verbal reports produced by some of the raters confirmed that these differences resulted in different impressions of the candidate’s ability: in one interview the candidate was considered to be more ‘effective’ and ‘willing’ as a communicator than in the other. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for rater training and test design.