The interactional consequences of asking for opinions about literature in Dutch oral exams

This study examines the interactional consequences of opinion-seeking questions in Dutch oral exams. In classroom interactions, presenting an opinion, a personal view on a topic, has been found to be produced with caution by students. Teachers do not evaluate the opinion but invite the student to elaborate, making room for, and acknowledging the student’s epistemic right to an opinion. This may be different in oral exams, because student responses to questions may be (treated as) ‘insufficient’ and thus have implications for the overall assessment. However, how teachers treat student opinions in oral exams, whether opinions are evaluated on the interactional level and how student opinions are followed up by teachers, have not yet been examined. Our data consist of 27 recordings of Dutch oral exams which we analyzed sequentially using conversation analysis. Based on 21 instances of opinion-seeking questions, we found that these questions serve as a stepping-stone for asking known-information questions (KIQs). Second, we found that opinion-seeking questions may serve as KIQs, regardless of their packaging as opinion elicitations. Despite the fact that an opinion lies in the student’s epistemic domain, teachers position themselves as having epistemic primacy, and students orient to being assessed. Although opinion-seeking questions may serve to organize the interaction around a particular book or effectively reassure students in a stressful situation by ascribing them epistemic rights to articulate an opinion, their use in and for oral exams is entirely different from opinions in classroom interaction and not straightforward.