Seedhouse-Supakorn2015

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Seedhouse-Supakorn2015
BibType ARTICLE
Key Seedhouse-Supakorn2015
Author(s) Paul Seedhouse, Sumita Supakorn
Title Topic-as-script and topic-as-action in language assessment and teaching
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, Applied, Topic, Interview
Publisher
Year 2015
Language English
City
Month
Journal Applied Linguistics Review
Volume 6
Number 3
Pages 393-413
URL Link
DOI 10.1515/applirev-2015-0018
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

‘Topic’ is a construct of great practical importance in the fields of language teaching and assessment. Topic organisation featured prominently as an object of early Conversation Analysis (CA) research (for example in Sacks’s (1992) lectures) but has fallen from the research agenda and become the Cinderella construct in discourse studies in recent years. This article considers two institutional settings in which ‘topic’ is foregrounded and becomes a prominent interactional organisation which drives the institutional business, namely language assessment and language teaching. The argument is that much remains to be discovered about how topic becomes adapted to institutional goals. In these specific settings, topic has developed a ‘dual personality’ in service to the institutional goals; ‘topic-as-script’ is the homogenised topic which examiners give to candidates and teachers give to learners, whereas ‘topic-as-action’ refers to the ways in which candidates and learners talk a topic into being. The movement from ‘topic’ as a single homogeneous script to a heterogeneous series of responses by different learners/candidates (topic-as-action) is the main focus of interest in this study. In both teaching and assessment settings, this transformation of ‘topic’ provides a basis for the analysis and evaluation of learner/candidate performance. Sacks (1992: 541) argues, in relation to ordinary conversation, that topical organisation is an “accessory” to turn-taking and sequence. By contrast, topic is, in the language classroom and language testing settings examined, employed in multiple ways on multiple levels as an organising principle for the interaction; topic is both a vehicle and a focus of the interaction. It is suggested that research into institutional talk should investigate more closely how topic becomes adapted to the institutional goal.

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