Digitally Empowered Assessment of Interactional Competence in a Second Language

Abstract

As language assessment increasingly recognizes interaction as socially co‐constructed, interactional competence (IC) has emerged as a central construct for understanding learners’ ability to manage communication across social and cultural contexts. At the same time, digitally mediated communication environments and artificial intelligence (AI)‐powered conversational agents are transforming both interaction itself and the ways in which it can be assessed. These technologies also create new opportunities for second language research more broadly by facilitating data collection from geographically dispersed and historically underrepresented learner populations. This introduction reviews key challenges in IC assessment, including tensions among construct validity, interactional authenticity, reliability, and practicality, and discusses how digital technologies offer new opportunities for scalable, standardized, and pedagogically meaningful assessment. It synthesizes the six empirical and conceptual studies and one commentary included in the special issue and concludes by outlining future directions for research, including expanding linguistic and sociocultural diversity, integrating discourse analytic approaches, reconceptualizing IC for AI‐mediated interaction, and exploring automated scoring methods.