What has Language Proficiency Got to Do with Accommodation in Interviewer-Interviewee Interaction?: The Case of Korean Oral Proficiency Interview Discourse

What has Language Proficiency Got to Do with Accommodation in Interviewer-Interviewee Interaction?: The Case of Korean Oral Proficiency Interview Discourse

This paper takes a qualitative and microanalytic approach to the analysis of Korean oral proficiency interview (OPI) discourse to (a) examine native-speaker (NS) interviewer accommodation behaviors during OPIs and (b) effects of non-native- speaker proficiency level on OPI interaction discourse patterns. 10-minute segments, each, from a set of five demonstration Korean OPIs were used as the data for this study. Based on previous studies, a list of accommodative behaviors used by NS interviewers upon perceiving communicative breakdowns during OPIs was created, with modification, to identify and classify such behaviors. The results show that (1) not all accommodative behaviors in the list were employed and that (2) there was a difference in an average number of accommodative behaviors used between the low and high proficiency groups.