Language testers have generally come to recognize the limitations of traditional statistical methods for validating oral language tests. They have begun to consider more innovative approaches to test validation, approaches that promise to illuminate the assessment process itself, rather than just assessment outcomes (i.e., ratings). One such approach is conversation analysis (or CA), a rigorous empirical methodology developed by sociologists, which employs inductive methods in order to discover and describe the recurrent, systematic properties of conversation, including sequential...