Multiple questions in oral proficiency interviews

A pervasive feature of oral proficiency interviewing is the interviewer's management of candidate comprehension of questions and tasks used for assessment. Interaction troubles ensuing from interview candidates misconstruing or mishearing questions may impede the process of gathering evidence of candidate proficiency and arriving at justifiable rating of proficiency. In order to forestall potential comprehension problems, and in some instances, as reactions to specific troubles, many OPI question turns include multiple questions on the same topic of talk. The situated relevance to both reactive and proactive multiple questions is the focus of the present paper. The data for the analysis of multiple questions come form a corpus of more than 100 instances of oral proficiency interview questions and tasks. Attention is placed on the interaction relevance of multiple questions with the goal of identifying features of interaction that motivate both reactive (or vertical) repeated questions, and proactive (or horizontal) question repetitions. Vertical multiple questions are shown to be sequenced according to immediate troubles in candidate uptake of prior question content, corresponding to the phenomena of repair, missing rejoinders, or problematic answers. Horizontal multiple questions are in contrast situated in ‘fragile’ environments where the probability of mishearing may be large.