Assessing Interactional Competence through paired speaking tasks

Interaction-based speaking tests, containing paired or group oral tests, have been considered crucial formats of speaking assessment. The promising aspect of such tests is that they can prepare authentic or real-conversation like tasks for test takers to take part in, make the researchers investigate L2 learners' interactional competence as an important research and increase the validity of speaking scores received from such tests. This study intended to know the nature of peer-peer interaction in L2 paired speaking tasks through the perspectives of second language acquisition and task-based language assessment. This goal has been achieved by understanding the construct of interactional competence at micro-level (i.e. certain features in interaction and investigating how task type influenced using the interaction features).