Do Examiners and Test-takers imitate each other? Dialogic resonance in second language testing

Abstract

Do Test-takers imitate Examiners’ language use? What about the other way around? This paper is centred on the impact of verbal imitation in spoken L2 English language tests. We assessed this by measuring Test-takers’ and Examiners’ degrees of dialogic resonance (Du Bois, J. (2014) ‘Towards a dialogic syntax’, Cognitive Linguistics, 25: 359–410. doi: 10.1515/cog-2014-0024; Tantucci, V. (2023) ‘Resonance and recombinant creativity: Why they are important for research in Cognitive Linguistics and Pragmatics’, Intercultural Pragmatics, 20: 347–76. doi: 10.1515/ip-2023-4001), a key mechanism for learning and engagement. Resonance involves speakers’ ability to re-use words and expressions uttered by their interlocutors during an interaction. It is often creative and can be reliably measured as a continuous variable on a large scale (Tantucci, V., and Wang, A. (2021) ‘Resonance and engagement through (dis-) agreement: Evidence of persistent constructional priming from Mandarin naturalistic interaction’, Journal of Pragmatics, 175: 94–111. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2021.01.002; Tantucci, V., and Wang, A. (2022a) ‘Resonance as an applied predictor of cross-cultural interaction: Constructional priming in Mandarin and American English interaction’, Applied Linguistics, 43: 115–46. doi: 10.1093/applin/amab012; Tantucci, V., and Wang, A. (2024) ‘British Conversation is Changing: Resonance and Engagement in the BNC1994 and the BNC2014’, Applied Linguistics, amae040; Tantucci, V., and Lepadat, C. (2024) ‘Verbal engagement in doctor–patient interaction: Resonance in Western and Traditional Chinese Medicine’, Journal of Pragmatics, 230: 126–41. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2024.07.002). We retrieved 2,564 turns from the Spoken Dialogues of the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English. We fitted a multifactorial mixed-effects linear regression of resonance between Examiners and Test-takers and found that verbal imitation plays different roles in language testing. First, resonance values are persistently high both in Test-takers and Examiners. Second, learners’ imitation is key in L2 pragmatic competence and proficiency: the more proficient learners are, the higher the resonance with their interlocutors. Most decisively, Examiners’ resonance improves Test-takers’ performance: the more an Examiner resonates with a Test-taker, the longer the Test-takers’ utterance in the following turn. We discuss implications for second language learning and language testing, and practical applications for Examiners’ training and language teaching materials development.