Oral discourse competence-in-performance: analysing learner dialogues

Abstract

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.