Assessment literacy (AL) empowers teachers (Grabowski & Dakin, 2014) by helping them make better decisions about the development, administration, and use of assessments (Harding & Kremmel, 2016; Popham, 2009). This is crucial because when teachers make erroneous interpretations, which lead to incorrect decisions, students can suffer…

In this paper, we focus on a special use of but in interactions in which those doing the questioning and answering are accountable for producing talk that is relevant to a third party--an overhearing audience. Specifically, we aim to show how participants leverage the contrastive power of "but" in turn-initial position to refocus…

The authors had the privilege of speaking over dinner with John Heritage, a plenary speaker at the eighth annual Conference of "The Language and Social Interaction Working Group" (LANSI) held at Teachers College, Columbia University. Dr. Heritage is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)…

In public broadcasting, the primary goal of interviewing an expert is to inform and educate the audience for the benefit of societal interests (Clayman, 2013). Previous work on news interviews has noted that this type of public discourse not only involves the host and the expert, but also an overhearing audience (Clayman & Heritage, 2002;…

During an online webinar, a question and answer (Q&A) segment is a valuable time during which audience members can petition an institution's hosting representatives to clarify, expand upon, or otherwise assist with questions or issues that remain after a presentation has been made. As would be the case in any information-dissemination event,…

Visual conduct, including the use of gaze to attend to bodily-visual cues and other semiotic resources in interaction, has long been a topic of interest in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA). Past EMCA work has examined visual conduct in face-to-face interaction, shedding light on the use of gaze to secure recipiency, facilitate…

Examinations of the words we use in our daily lives have shown that certain linguistic patterns may be indicators of underlying depressogenic schemata. The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and multidimensional scaling (MDS) have been used as methods of computerized text analysis to yield insight into how people's language use may be…

Media discourse has been attracting numerous conversation analysts' attention within the past one or two decades (e.g., Clayman & Heritage, 2002; Hutchby, 2006). TV talk shows, as a "semi-institutional" context which contains coexisting features of both daily conversation and institutional language (Ilie, 2001), has particularly…

This article provides an overview of conversation analytic research that investigates the phenomenon of interlocutors "finishing each other's sentences," termed "collaborative completion, in everyday conversation. The objective is twofold: (1) by reporting on research that examines the formal features and the social actions of…

As technology continues to shape our interactions in both personal and educational contexts, the exploration of how computer-mediated communication (CMC) may impact the development of second language writing skills has received greater interest. While a growing body of research has investigated potential applications of this technology within…

The way we ask for something, or "request," is hardly the same across all contexts. The degree to which we show politeness in these instances is closely related to a number of contextual factors (Brown & Levinson, 1987), manifested in the linguistic features that we employ (Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper, 1989; Searle, 1975).…

Although corrective feedback (CF) has attracted much attention in the field of second language acquisition, there is scant research pertaining to CF in naturalistic written computer-mediated communication (CMC). This exploratory study addressed this gap by describing the types of CF that occurred and evaluating their relative effects on learner…

Language for specific purposes (LSP) has a long history in the language testing literature. An outgrowth of the communicative language movement of the 1970s, LSP testing arose out of the practical need to assess individuals' abilities to perform specific tasks in academic and professional settings. This historical review traces the evolution of…

The conceptualization of L2 [second language] proficiency has evolved to include a broader range of knowledge, skills, and abilities, prompting L2 testers to embrace new approaches to defining and assessing L2 speaking ability. This review discusses the evolution of L2 proficiency and speaking ability, and suggests scenario-based assessment (SBA)…