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Engagement and expressing sympathy

Multimodality and the assessment of interactional competence

ORCiD logo with link | Pennsylvania State University
ORCiD logo with link | Georgia State University
Published online: 3 July 2026
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ap.22010.loo
Abstract
Engagement is an established, observable construct for the assessment of L2 interactional competence (Ikeda, N. (2017). Measuring L2 oral pragmatic abilities for use in social contexts: Development and validation of an assessment instrument for L2 pragmatics performance in university settings [Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Melbourne]., (2021). Assessing L2 learners’ pragmatic ability in problem-solving situations at English-medium university. Applied Pragmatics, 3(1), 51–83. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Youn, S. (2013). Validating task-based assessment of L2 pragmatics in interaction using mixed methods [Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa]., (2020b). Interactional features of L2 pragmatic interaction in role-play speaking assessment. TESOL Quarterly, 54(1), 201–233. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). 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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Interactional competence
  • 3.CA, multimodality, and L2 assessment
  • 4.The study
    • 4.1Background
    • 4.2Analysis
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (76)
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