This paper employs Conversation Analysis to investigate a specific interactional environment in Swedish police interviews (PIs): sequences where the interviewee asserts an inability to recollect specific events, and the police subsequently challenge this assertion. The police interview serves as a crucial setting for reconstructing past events and identifying the distribution of knowledge among participants. While previous research has delved into the cognitive mechanisms underlying memory retrieval in PIs, there exists a scarcity of empirical investigation of how memories and their associated knowledge are interactionally managed within this high-stakes activity. Prior Conversation Analytic studies exploring how epistemic dimensions shape social interaction form the theoretical basis for the current study, including research indicating how ‘forgetfulness’ can be strategically employed as an interactional resource. Only a few studies have targeted recorded high-stakes interviews in Swedish, and the lack of such is problematic since international research have highlighted the influence of cultural and social factors on conditions and outcomes. Data used for this study comprises anonymized audio recordings (N = 51) from a preliminary murder investigation, making a valuable contribution to the understanding of interactional practices in Swedish police interviews. Results indicate a discrepancy in orientation between the police and the interviewee. The former treats the memories as accessible knowables possible to retrieve, in contrast to the latter, who uses the police’s challenge as a vehicle for contesting the ‘impossible action of remembering.’

Studier som fokuserar på det akademiska skrivandets sociala sammanhang har påvisat ett glapp mellan lärarnas förväntningar på studenternas skrivande och studenternas tolkningar av lärarnas krav. En studentgrupp vars skrivande särskilt har hamnat i fokus är flerspråkiga studenter, vilket kanske kan förklaras med att lärarna ofta är ovana vid dessa studenters förutsättningar. I syfte att rikta ljuset mot glappet undersöker vi hur högskolelärare reflekterar muntligt kring sin bedömning av flerspråkiga studenters texter vilka uppvisar tydliga andraspråksdrag. Materialet utgörs av retrospektiva intervjuer kring lärarnas respons på studenttexter, och för undersökningen tillämpas det sociokulturella ramverket Academic Literacies, i kombination med Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA). Genom att undersöka hur kategoriseringar konstrueras interaktionellt bidrar studien till att belysa hur normer och förväntningar kopplade till bedömningspraktiken uttrycks. Resultaten pekar på variation gällande attityder till andraspråksdrag, och MCA bidrar till att fånga hur dessa attityder uttrycks genom kategoriseringar och positioneringar. Å ena sidan konstrueras klassiska akademiska ideal, där lärare och student positioneras med stort avstånd till varandra gällande kompetenser och resurser. Å andra sidan uttrycks också ett mer dynamiskt förhållningssätt mellan lärare och student, vilket representerar ett perspektiv rotat i Academic Literacies.

For two decades, it has been a statutory provision in the Higher Education Act to strive for widening participation. This has led to new and more diverse student groups, one of which being students with a mother tongue other than Swedish. Recurrently, their writing ability tends to be focused in the debate. In the field of Academic Literacies, writing is considered to be a socio-culturally rooted practice, in which teachers’ attitudes strongly impact the writing process. This article presents a study of teachers’ attitudes towards second language students’ writing, aiming to shed light on norms and conditions surrounding L2 students’ academic writing. Teachers’ written feedback concerning linguistic features has been analysed based on theories on feedback practices. The same teachers have also been interviewed regarding their feed-back, using stimulated recall-technique. The results show that the teachers’ feedback reflect different perspectives on the writing process, as well as their own role in the education system. In sum, the study shows that the lack of collegial consensus allows for parallel norms to exist, which results in the students within the same educational program being exposed to a wide range of expectations regarding how texts ought to be written.

Under två decennier har högre utbildning haft breddad rekrytering som målsättning, vilket har fört med sig nya och mer heterogena studentgrupper. En av dessa är studenter med annat modersmål än svenska, och återkommande tenderar deras skrivförmåga att fokuseras i debatten. Att skrivande är sammankopplat med det sociala sammanhang där skrivandet sker har beskrivits väl inom fältet Academic Literacies. I den här artikeln presenteras en studie med fokus på lärares attityder och förhållningssätt till andraspråksstudenters skrivande. Syftet med studien är att belysa normer som präglar skrivandets sammanhang, för att på så vis få en bättre bild av de förutsättningar som präglar och omgärdar andraspråksstudenters skrivande i olika ämnen under deras utbildningsprogram. För att undersöka detta har lärares skriftliga respons som rör språket analyserats med avstamp i teorier om respons. De lärare som skrivit responsen har också intervjuats om sin respons med hjälp av stimulated recall-teknik. Resultaten visar att lärarnas respons präglas av deras egna erfarenheter, syn på skrivprocessen samt den egna rollen inom utbildningen. Sammantaget visar undersökningen att bristen på kollegial samsyn mellan ämnen inom programmet ger utrymme för parallella normer att existera, vilket resulterar i att studenterna möter ett brett spann av förväntningar på hur texter ska utformas. 

The present paper looks at the issue of standardization in L2 oral testing. Whereas external examiners are frequently used globally, some countries opt for test-takers' own teachers as examiners instead. In the present study, Sweden is used as a case in point, with a focus on the mandatory, high-stakes, summative, ninth-grade national test in English (speaking part). The national test has the typical characteristics of standardized tests and its main objective is to contribute to equity in assessment and grading on a national level. However, using teachers as examiners raises problems for standardization. The aim of this study is to examine teachers'/examiners' practices and views regarding four aspects of the speaking test - test-taker grouping, recording practices, the actual test occasion, and examiner participation in students' test interactions - and to discuss findings in relation to issues concerning the normativity and practical feasibility of standardization, taking the perspectives of test-takers, teachers/examiners, and test constructors into account. In order to answer research questions linked to these four aspects of L2 oral testing, self-report survey data from a random sample of teachers (N = 204) and teacher interviews (N = 11) were collected and quantitative data were analyzed using inferential statistics. Survey findings revealed that despite thorough instructions, teacher practices and views vary greatly across all aspects, which was further confirmed by interview data. Three background variables - teacher certification, work experience, gender - were investigated to see whether they could provide explanations. Whereas certification and gender did not contribute significantly to explaining the findings, work experience bore some relevance, but effect sizes were generally small. The study concludes that using teachers as examiners is a well-functioning procedure in terms of assessment for learning, but raises doubts regarding assessment of learning and standardization; a solution for test authorities could be to frame the test as non-standardized.

Despite a long-standing interest in repair practices, much is yet to be learned about participants' selections of components of the repair operation, and their systematic variation across contexts and languages (Hayashi et al., 2013b; Kitzinger, 2013). The present paper targets the initiation of self-repair through examination of a particular discursive object, the Swedish conjunction eller ('or'), located in repair-prefacing position in a corpus of 79 second language (L2) oral proficiency tests. In the corpus, eller is systematically produced in Swedish, while surrounding talk is produced in the target language, English. As such, the repair initiations are code-switched (e.g., Auer, 1998b). Building on the recent work on or-prefaced repair initiations in English (Lerner and Kitzinger, 2015), we examine the role of eller-initiated repair (EIR), i.e., repair prefaced by eller, in the context of paired L2 tests. We also contrast EIRs with or-prefaced repair initiations in the same dataset. Findings indicate that EIRs serve to display trouble awareness, which may relate to necessary revisions of both form and content of the talk in English. The 'other-languageness' (Gafaranga, 2000) of the momentary code-switch amplifies test-takers' attention to what needs to be replaced or revised, and indicates to co-participants that self-repair is underway. The practice helps push forward turn transition and pre-empts conclusions about the speaker's stance or linguistic competence, which may be particularly relevant in a language testing context. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

In this paper, we address language teachers’ continuing professional development (CPD) and engagement with research by demonstrating how research on English as a foreign language (EFL) speaking tests can be applied in professional training workshops on oral test interaction and assessment. Data were drawn from an ongoing research project targeting 9^th-grade national English speaking tests in Sweden. Authentic test recordings analysed in a previous study (Sandlund & Sundqvist, 2013) formed the basis for workshops designed to initiate discussions on testing and assessing EFL oral proficiency. The two-fold aim of the study is to implement a research-based workshop model for increasing teachers’ awareness of interaction in speaking tests, and to analyse teachers’ self-reported insights from workshop participation with regard to conducting speaking tests and assessing oral proficiency. Workshop experiences were followed up with questionnaires. Findings reveal some noteworthy pedagogical implications of collaborative work with test recordings and assessment.

In this review article, empirical studies published from 2004 through 2014 on second-language (L2) oral proficiency testing are analyzed, with a specific focus on discourse and social interaction in such tests. Taking three common test setups, oral proficiency interviews (OPIs), paired peer tests, and group peer tests as an organizing principle for the studies examined, recent developments in L2 oral proficiency testing research are situated, reviewed, and discussed, with a particular focus on tests conducted in face-to-face contexts. Findings from the review of selected journals, databases, monographs, and edited collections indicate (1) a prevalence of studies of the OPI format, but a growing research base on paired and group tests, (2) an absence of oral test studies in discourse journals, and (3) an emphasis on assessment, validation, and rater perspectives, as opposed to detailed analyses of interaction in L2 tests.

This paper examines how a standardized question is launched and received in a corpus of performance appraisal interviews, with a focus on how pre-formulated questions are translated into interaction. Using conversation analysis, we demonstrate that the same question becomes many different actions in practice. Prefaces as well as prosodic and lexical alterations make relevant different responses, and as such, the question can be recruited to initiate diverse interactional projects such as assessments and other socially delicate activities. As a consequence, goals of uniformity and standardization may be subverted. The interactional adaptations further evidence the strength of recipient design as reformulations also result in more fitted and personalized answers. Our study contributes to the understanding of standardization versus interactionalization, and points to the strong interrelationship between question design and the fitting of response options.