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Article published In:
Language and Dialogue
Vol. 9:2 (2019) ► pp.236–263

Oral discourse competence-in-performance

Analysing learner dialogues

| Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona (Spain)
| Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona (Spain)

Mastering a language implies being able to deploy a wide variety of speech genres (Bakhtin 1952–1953). However, the features which define these genres are often obscure to students or ‘occluded’ in the sense used by Swales (1996). In this paper, nine dialogues between B1-level French learners in the context of an oral exam are analysed in order to describe the degree of dialogic competence-in-performance (Weigand 2017) achieved. Because these dialogues were of two types, an exchange of opinions and a guided interview, our analysis reveals hybrid results. This hybridity affects the opening and closing sequences of the dialogue, floor-taking in the central part and the linguistic resources used by the students to give their opinions. These findings identify formative needs as well as the indicators of achievement that are required to assess students’ oral competence-in-performance.

Keywords: dialogue, assessment, oral communication, speech genres, French as a Foreign Language, exam
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework: Discourse competence-in-performance and oral communication
    • 2.1Oral communication: Dimensions and units of analysis
      • 2.1.1The sociocultural dimension
      • 2.1.2Pragmatic dimension
      • 2.1.3Textual dimension
    • 2.2Spoken discourse genres in the CEFR (2018): Assessment criteria
    • 2.3Description of speech genres
  • 3.Corpus and methodology
  • 4.Analysis and discussion
    • 4.1Conversational sequences: Framing and topic sequences
    • 4.2Turn-taking in S-S (échange)
    • 4.3Turn-taking in S-S-T (guided interview)
    • 4.4Backchannels
    • 4.5Linguistic resources
  • 5.Conclusions and pedagogical implications
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00040.can
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