ABSTRACT
There is an increasing trend for both commercial and in-house classroom face-to-face speaking tests to incorporate features of interactional competence (IC) in the rating scale in response to the wide acknowledgement that IC is an essential part of the speaking construct. Accordingly, in online-based assessment video conference technologies such as Skype and Zoom have been introduced to provide the opportunities for interaction. The recent Covid-19 pandemic has further accelerated this trend resulting in transforming existing face-to-face speaking assessments across the sectors into online-based assessments with video-conferencing facilities. However, the transformation has caused technological and environmental challenges and revealed that the usability of this mode in the assessment of IC is still in its infancy. The chapter discusses how the video conference mode of assessment has shaped our understanding of IC in the context of a large public university in Vietnam drawing on the test usefulness by Bachman and Palmer (1996).
