This study serves as an attempt to validate an in‐house oral proficiency test (hereafter referred to as OPT) with a particular focus on prompt effects on assessment of interactional competence, an issue that has attracted burgeoning interest but not been adequately investigated yet. Prompts employed in the parallel versions of the group discussion task, which were supposed to be comparable, were found to differ in two dimensions, that is, topical domain and syntactic structure. The transcribed interactions from 136 sophomore test takers (34 groups) sitting in the first administration of the OPT were coded through a rigorous procedure and examined using conversation analysis. Five patterns of interaction were identified with distinct features based on two dimensions, mutuality and equality. Marked differences in distribution of patterns of interaction were detected in discourse elicited by different prompts, which should be mainly attributed to the syntactic structure of the prompts. The open‐question prompts were found more likely to elicit “conversation‐like” interaction with higher mutuality, characterized by the collaborative and unbalanced‐collaborative patterns, while the closed‐question prompts tended to elicit more “solo versus solo” interaction with lower mutuality, featured by the parallel and unbalanced‐parallel patterns. The influence of topic domain, however, was minimal. The results thereby constitute rebuttals that weaken meaningfulness and impartiality of the claim of interpretations about the construct within Bachman and Palmer's assessment use argument framework and suggest close attention from the test developers. The implications for prompt design, and development and validation of the group oral test are further provided.

中文翻译：

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对小组口语测试中互动能力评估的即时影响

本研究试图验证内部口语能力测试（以下简称 OPT），特别关注对互动能力评估的即时影响，这个问题引起了人们的广泛关注，但尚未得到充分研究。小组讨论任务的并行版本中使用的提示本应具有可比性，但发现在两个维度上存在差异，即主题领域和句法结构。第一轮 OPT 中 136 名大二考生（34 组）的互动记录通过严格的程序进行编码，并使用对话分析进行检查。基于二维、相互性和平等性，确定了五种具有不同特征的交互模式。在不同提示引发的话语中发现交互模式分布存在显着差异，这主要归因于提示的句法结构。研究发现，开放式问题提示更有可能引发具有较高相互性的“类对话”互动，其特征是协作和不平衡的协作模式，而封闭式问题提示则倾向于引发更多具有较低相互性的“独奏与独奏”互动。 ，以平行和不平衡平行模式为特征。然而，主题领域的影响很小。因此，结果构成反驳，削弱了巴赫曼和帕尔默评估使用论证框架内的构造解释主张的意义和公正性，并建议测试开发人员密切关注。进一步提供了对小组口语测试的及时设计、开发和验证的影响。