In this paper I will discuss the language behavior of learners of English as a foreign language in an interactive oral examination. The primary objective is to examine the linguistic resources mobilized by the interactants in order to negotiate the exam task, within its institutional and cultural context. To do so, I will discuss the institutional context in which the activity was under-taken, the socio-cultural and linguistic background of the language learners, the contextual parameters of the exam-task, the linguistic data produced, and possible implications for the design of future examination activities.

The language data I will discuss was recorded at Inha University, Inchon, South Korea, in December of 1996. The interactants were first-year learners of English as a foreign language. Further information about the background of the interactants, and the institutional context will be given below. The learners' task was to engage in an information-gap activity based on slightly different pictures, and to display their knowledge of the English language skills taught in class in the process. Their instructor acted as coordinator, graded the learners on their performance, provided linguistic support, and recorded the present data.

Superficially, this context can be easily recognized as one of language and therefore cultures in contact. Korean learners are operating in English which they have studied as a foreign language. However, the situation is considerably more complex than merely the use of a English in a foreign language setting. This context is part of a foreign language learning program and as Pennycook points out, "It is important to see language teaching practice not as some neutral aspect of classroom methodology or technology but rather as cultural practices" (1994: 166). The interactants in this situation not only performed a task in a foreign language, they also used an unfamiliar aspect of that language, in an unfamiliar way, to negotiate an unfamiliar, and within their institutional setting, highly unconventional type of task. Moreover, as the task was a testing or "gate-keeping encounter" Scollon and Scollon (1983:157), the task called upon the interactants to engage with, and crucially, to be judged by, an unfamiliar set of values. Their performance-data reveals how the interactants dealt with a new and different set of expectations than those common in either their previous cultural or institutional experience.

In 1996, the Korean Ministry of Education introduced the requirement that all first-year students take one year of basic oral English Language training. This training is to be made up of two class-hours of instruction each week during the two 16 week terms. Once holidays, English department exams, non-English department exams, and university social and sports functions have been subtracted, this comes to about ten weeks of classes, with about an hour and forty minutes of class time per week. Important background on the structure of tertiary English language education in Korea and the place of foreign instructors in it can be found in Neiderhauser (1996).

To meet Ministry of Education requirements, English language education at Inha University was greatly expanded, and a new and independent department was set up for the first time in February of 1996. Sixteen foreign instructors of English conversation were hired. Each instructor in the department commonly teaches up to ten classes of roughly forty first-year students. I estimate the total number of students in the program to be about six-thousand. The students are drawn from a variety of mostly technical majors like Engineering, Computer-Science, and Physical Education. Students majoring in English Language, Literature and Linguistics or English-Education are taught in separate departments.

Instructors commonly teach roughly three-hundred students broken into eight to ten classes of about forty by major. Due to the fact that none of the students is actually majoring in English, or expects to use their English language skills in their professional environment, lack of student motivation is an extreme problem for instructors in the department. This is compounded by the prevailing notion that the first year of university study is a rest year after the rigorous university entrance exam process that dominates the final year of highs school, and before young men are inducted into three years of compulsory military service

In the past, examinations had taken the form of standardised taped, multiple choice or short answer listening tests. It seems that these tests had been developed in previous years and commonly had little or no relation to the texts or curricula in use in a particular year or class. Interestingly, learners seemed to have no expectation that they would. The incoming instructors soon succeeded in having these tests phased out and replaced by some form of spoken conversation task. The institution's preferred option, and the preferred strategy for many of the incoming teachers would have been to grade students based on individual student-teacher interviews. However, the number of students involved made this logistically impossible. Due to motivational factors, and an unfortunate choice of teaching materials by departmental administration, most instructors decided to develop their own separate and individual curricula and began experimenting with various forms of dialogue based testing task involving pairs of students. This degree of experimentation may seem incongruous within the authoritarian Confucianist Korean education system, however it cannot be assumed that measurable student attainment of defined learning goals in relation to foreign language education is of relevance to the host institution (Neiderhauser 1996).

All students in Korea receive training in English grammar and vocabulary from middle-school (Junior-High) onwards. This training is profoundly non-communicative. There is a heavy emphasis on intensive rote-memorisation of vocabulary and unanalysed phrases, and on passive, multiple choice, taped, listening examinations. Since it is currently illegal for high-school students to study at private language schools (and most would not have time anyway), unless they have had the opportunity to travel overseas, their chances of having studied with a native speaker of English before coming to university, or of having been exposed to communicative learning activities and testing methods, are virtually nil. Learners commonly enter university at the level of "false-beginner". That is, they have a relatively wide but somewhat abstract vocabulary, and some memory of the abstract grammatical rules which they crammed for the university entrance examination.

Following Perrett's (1997) analysis, the interactants in this study may be more appropriately classed as learners of English as an International Language rather than the more commonly used term English as a Foreign Language. Their objective is language which is "intelligible, grammatical, and appropriate" rather than any specific target dialect, although U.S. standard holds a high prestige value. If they expect to use their language skills at all, they expect to use them with a variety of international non-native speakers, rather than with members of a particular target culture. They certainly have no inclination to uncritically assimilate foreign cultural values and find any such expectation patronising at best. Their most salient and immediate context of use is with a foreign instructor when called upon in class, or for display purposes in an examination. Their learning style is oriented towards non-contextualized abstract learning rather than communicative practice with other learners. Indeed some find the idea of practising a "foreign" language with members of the home culture to be uncomfortable.

The curriculum out of which this exam-task arose focussed on the specific characteristics of spoken language (see Halliday 1989). In particular it focussed on language explored through dialogue using the most immediate, personal, and/or concrete/visual materials and topic matter available. We can immediately note how such a curriculum values different aspects of language from the abstract, non-communicative, almost exclusively written or passive-listening based English learning students were accustomed to. To soften the impact of this change, overtly foreign content was specifically avoided in favour of the personal, local, and immediate. Use of Korean words in writing and speech for local items and customs was encouraged, and the use of the learners' first language as an aid to learning was not discouraged. They were also encouraged to think of the grammar of English as a resource for constructing and exchanging meanings, rather than as a set of rules to be judged by.

Specifically, the learners' exam-task was to exchange information about, and find the differences between two similar but not identical pictures of a simple scene. The Learners sat facing each other and so each could not see the other's picture. This learning activity-type is commonly referred to as "Picture differences" (see Ur 1988: 185-8). Their instructor supervised, graded their performance using a detailed grading sheet, and assisted with vocabulary and instructions where appropriate. While the specific pictures were new to the learners, they had practised activities of this type extensively in class and done a simpler information-exchange task on their mid-term exam. They were graded on their use of the grammatical forms taught and practised in class, and these were ticked-off on separate grading sheets for each learner by the instructor as they occurred correctly in the learner's speech. As was familiar from the mid-term examination, learners were not penalised for mistakes, lack of fluency, or forgotten vocabulary, only rewarded for displaying what they had learned. The use of the learners' first language was not discouraged, and the instructor provided assistance when necessary. See for example Transcript 2: 15, 16,19 and Transcript 3: 10, 18, 42. Learners were allowed to chose their own partners, and to be as interactive in their approach as possible. The task was designed to be a natural context for the use of the grammatical forms taught in class, and the learners were given the instructor's grading sheet to study from as part of their examination review. Note that standard practice for oral examinations would have been to interview students individually for only a few minutes, and to grade them on the basis of their global fluency and pronunciation without explicit criteria. It is my subjective impression that learners chose partners of roughly equal ability, and that their performance on the exam correlated very strongly with their attention and participation in class. Learners were told that their exams would be taped so that their grades could be clarified in the event of a dispute, and for future research. They did not object and seemed not to notice the tape recorder. They also practised a short interactive task based on personal information which I will not discuss.

Following Lemke (1989, 1990), the exam task can be analysed on two levels over and above that of a simple test of grammatical form. Firstly, as an information-gap activity, it required the learners to compare two slightly differing "thematic patterns". That is, they verbally explored the slightly differing pattern of meaning relationships contained in their partner's picture, and constructed for them by their partner's questions and responses. As shown in the transcripts, this required some sophisticated negotiation between the partners to narrow down the scope of the patterns of meaning in the pictures and find the specific differences. The had not only to ask and answer questions, but crucially, to choose what questions to ask and how to be guided by their partners information to find relevant points of difference. This is a far more sophisticated skill than simply responding with disconnected tokens of information on a short answer test, or responding to a teacher directed string of display questions as in a traditional oral interview.

Secondly, part of the exam task was to practice a particular "activity structure" (Lemke 1989, 1990). This structure contained a variety of different kind of "moves" such as questioning, (e.g.: Transcript 1: 1), answering with confirmation (1: 2), answering with information (1: 4), follow-up questions (1: 5), requests for confirmation (1: 17), self-corrections (1: 24, 35), elaborations (2: 28, 40), and directions and prompts from the instructor. A crucial difference between this and the customary teacher-directed oral interview activity structure, is that aside from the instructor's prompts to begin and end the activity, all other moves are chosen and sequenced by the learners themselves within the assigned parameters of the exam-task. In other words, the learners were not only using language to display their grammatical learning and to compare the information structures of their subject materials (the pictures), they were using language to structure and manage a dialogue. They used language not only to answer questions, but to co-operate. Naturally, those learners who had practised the task over the course of the class-term were most successful at managing it under the exam conditions.

Since it is the system in which this researcher has been most extensively trained, I will discuss the aspects of the specific context of language use according to the "register variables" of Field, Tenor, and Mode familiar from Systemic-Functional Linguistics (see Halliday 1994, Eggins & Slade 1997, Gerot 1995). Analysis will be confined to the learners since they are the primary interactants.

Note that the Object Focus was immediate and visual. The learners were not discussing an imagined or hypothetical context and neither were they role-playing hypothetical characters. Note also that the Tenor variables of Status, Affect, and Contact are completely different from what they would be in the customary teacher-directed oral interview with a single student. In that case the status difference is extreme, the affect negative and judgmental, and the contact infrequent. In this situation, the instructor does not take direct part in the dialogue, and is present not only as evaluator but as coach and supporter.

The first feature obvious from the data is that the interactants chose to organize their turn-taking by having one dominant speaker in the role of questioner and director though out most of the exercise. This was a consistent pattern in the many pairs that were recorded. Notice how Speaker A in Transcript 3 directs his partner's attention to different parts of the picture with an imperative in turns 2-4 and 29. Note also how in Transcript 3, speaker A falls into the dominant role in turn 19, then signals his partner to ask the instructor for permission to change roles. No doubt they had agreed on roles before the exam and wanted to make sure there was no prohibition on such a strategy. There are other examples of role-switching in Transcript 2 turns 5 and 18.

The less dominant speaker allows their partner to initiate, but does not relinquish participation in control over the direction of the dialogue. In addition to back channeling and confirmational feedback, notice the elaboration in the speaker's responses at Transcript 1: 35, Transcript 2: 8, 28, 40, and Transcript 3: 19. Note also the responding interactant's requests for clarification at 1: 12, 22 and 2: 20. At two points interactants correct their partners: 1: 42 and 2: 36. There are also requests to the instructor for clarification at 1: 43, 2: 2, and 2: 23.

The learners choose not to solve the task with a string of disconnected polar questions, but rather, they compare information across a sequence of turns using a mix of information and polar questions, directives, elaborations and clarifications. This allows them to collaboratively zero in on details within the pictures. Transcript 1 contains five such sequences (turns 1-9, 11-26, 27-36, 37-46) and other pairs of interactants followed a similar pattern.

In conjunction with this strategy, learners used cohesive features (See Halliday & Hasan 1986, Halliday 1994) to refer efficiently to previously mentioned information, and to tie their discourse together. They made great use of pronominal reference, in spite of the great difficulty and confusion which this feature causes for Korean learners of English. See for example Transcript 3: 31-36 and 38-41. They may not always get the gender of the pronoun right (there is strong interference from the first language on this feature), but they use it successfully to indicate reference to previously negotiated information. They also use conjunction to link their elaborations to previous turns, as Speaker B does at Transcript 1 turn 35. There are also example of ellipsis of known information, for example "WHAT is [it/ the thing]?" at 1: 17 and "[It is] between the TREE" at 2: 28.

In order to mark out the most relevant information in their messages, the interactants use contrastive stress within their utterances. This especially applies to the referential pronouns which the learners find difficult to disambiguate. Notice how the speakers in Transcript 2 get mixed up over the identity of a character in the picture who is feeding a bird. There are in fact two characters who are feeding the pigeons in the park: a woman and a man. In turns 11-16 they discuss the woman. In turns 18-24, Speaker A attempts to discuss the man, but he uses the wrong pronoun and his partner thinks it is still the woman who is under discussion. Notice how when the discussion moves to the sculpture of the man on the horse in turn 29, he stresses the gender of the figure and corrects himself immediately and stresses the correct pronoun. In transcript 1 turns 37-44 the learners negotiate a mix-up over the prepositions under and behind. We can see how they stress the trunk, the room, the position behind, the picture, and finally the umbrella. By this point, Speaker A has enough relevant information to repair the problem with an appeal to the instructor which Speaker B emphatically confirms.

The interactants also use intonation to mark grammatical declaratives as interrogative appeals for confirmation (e.g.: 1: 40, 45), to contrast two parallel pieces of information (e.g.: 1:33) to show declarative confirmation (e.g.: 3:29) and even to show that question or answer which was under grammatical construction, has how reached its final form (e.g.: 2:33). The requirements on the interactants to display their learned grammatical knowledge, especially in relation to present tense with and without continuous aspect, can be seen in their lack of contractions, their frequent use of full clauses, and their reformulations and re-starts.

As noted above, the exam task placed a value on aspects of the English language which the learners, coming from their educational and institutional culture, would not normally expect to value. As an activity which is co-operative rather than directed, spoken rather than written, concrete and task oriented rather than abstract, active rather than passive, and specifically related to course material rather than standardized and global, the task emphasized new and unfamiliar aspects of a language which the learners had in fact been studying in a very different form since junior high school. In particular, we can see from the transcript data how learners co-operated to organize turn-taking and sub-topic control, and how they used stress and intonation to mark relevant information in their utterances. As an instructor, I was especially happy to see them extending their negotiation of meaning across several turns and using cohesive features to aid the formation of "transactional units" Stenström (1994) within the dialogue. This thinking "beyond the clause" (Halliday 1994) was a major aim of the curriculum. Hopefully the culture shock of these new exam practices and new valuations of unfamiliar aspects of spoken English was mitigated by the culturally affirming or neutral subject matter used through out the course (Field variable), and the emphasis on co-operation with peers rather than confrontation with the foreign instructor (Tenor variable).

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Speaker A: Female

Speaker B: Female

N.B.: The first couple of exchanges were lost due to recording failure.

Speaker A: Male

Speaker B: Female

Speaker A: Male

Speaker B: Male