| The increased demand for the development of communicative language use in second language (L2) education has led to language-assessment practices designed to demonstrate L2 learners' ability to use language in 'real-life' situations. While there has been a widely accepted view that the most adequate method is the oral proficiency interview (OPI), one critical issue is to what degree OPI methods can replicate 'real-life' language use. This study addresses this issue by identifying the types and frequency of repair strategies used by both interviewers and Japanese learners of English as a second language to overcome communication problems, and sequence patterns and functions in twelve tape-recorded OPIs at four proficiency levels (1+, 2, 2+, and 3). It also examines the nature of OPI negotiated interactions in comparison with that of native speaker (NS)-nonnative speaker (NNS) interactions in previous second language acquisition (SLA) research.;The results suggest that negotiated interactions that take place in resolving communication problems during an OPI, in a broad sense, resemble those that have been demonstrated in SLA research. However, since one important requirement of the OPI is to demonstrate candidates' limitations in communicating, interviewers attempt to push at the boundaries of the candidates' proficiency rather than striving to stay within them. Unlike NSs in SLA-research settings, interviewers manipulate repair discourse and the amount and quality of repair strategies in an attempt to elicit ratable speech samples. For this reason, OPI negotiations typically persist much longer than those seen in SLA research. Candidates, regardless of proficiency levels, more frequently initiate overt indications of communication difficulties. They also produce a larger amount of elaborated speech, exhibiting their efforts to demonstrate their communication skills. Results suggest that this form of negotiation is an important aspect of the OPI assessment.;Further examination of the OPI negotiated interactions suggests that the following variability factors merit closer attention in future research and in improving current OPI practices: various situational and individual characteristics, interviewers' diagnostic skills and the nature of their support, and interviewers' judgments about the quality of changes produced in candidates' performance during negotiation processes. |
