Stories of assessment: Spanish–English bilingual children's agency and interactional competence in oral language assessments

•Cognitive and monolingual assessment approaches may mask children's competencies.•Children showed agency and bilingualism in renegotiating language assessments.•Together Spanish and English served as resources for interactional competence.•Tasks conceived as monologic language samples became dialogic interactions.•Assessment practices must account for interactional competence and agency.

Prompted by a concern that the cognitivist orientation and monolingual biases of current language assessment practices may unwittingly perpetuate deficit perspectives on language minority children, this paper examines the linguistic, interactional, and identity resources that Spanish–English bilingual children used to co-construct interactional competence in narrative-based speaking assessments with bilingual researcher-assessors. Insights from sociocultural linguistics guided our close interactional analyses of three assessment excerpts, which we discuss in their ethnographic context by drawing on interview and observational data from our 18-month study. Our analysis demonstrates that children were able to create space for agency, bilingualism, and interaction even in assessments that assumed passive, monolingual, and monologic participation. We discuss implications of these findings for research and education, arguing that language assessment needs to be reconceptualized in ways that account for children's interactional competence and agency.