Student essays as evidential resource in placement meetings

Abstract

A large body of research from the perspectives of EMCA has examined how documents are used as situated resources to accomplish institutional tasks. Building on this research, our study examines the embodied use of student essays written for a placement test in academic English by a team of trained raters in placement meetings, with a focus on the “sequential particulars” (Day & Mortensen, 2017, p. 132) of the talk and the embodied practices that make the textuality and materiality of the essays consequential for their assessment and, reflexively, for the placement of their author. The evaluative meetings are organized as object-focused interaction in which the raters treat the essays as essential and omnirelevant objects. We show how the essays are mobilized as situated objects in different sequential environments and how the raters, by using the essays in locally specific ways, work towards accomplishing their institutional charge of making a placement decision.