Oral interaction: repairing a breakdown under time pressure
In a paired oral exam at B1, Candidate M must ask Candidate N about her weekend plans and then report back to the examiner. Thirty seconds in, N speaks quickly about a 'quedada' and M does not know the word. M freezes, says «no entiendo» twice, and the exchange collapses; the examiner moves on. M's vocabulary is otherwise solid, and she later reports that she knew how to say 'meet up' but panicked. The rubric awards points for maintaining interaction, asking for clarification, and reporting accurately. M has one more task and must not repeat the pattern.
1. Identify what M should have done in the moment, and give two or three concrete Spanish repair phrases she can deploy.
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M treated an unknown word as a terminal failure rather than a repairable gap. She should have signalled the problem specifically and kept the floor: «Perdona, no conozco la palabra 'quedada'. ¿Qué significa?»; «¿Puedes explicarlo de otra forma?»; «¿Te refieres a que vas a ver a tus amigos?» The third is the strongest because it is a comprehension check that offers a hypothesis, so N can simply confirm. Repeating «no entiendo» twice gives the partner no information about what failed and stalls the exchange; a targeted request keeps it alive and earns interaction credit.
2. M knew the word for 'meet up' but panicked. What does this tell us about the gap, and how should she prepare?
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The gap is not lexical storage but retrieval under communicative stress - a performance, not competence, problem. Preparation should therefore be procedural: rehearse a small set of repair routines until they are automatic, so they surface when attention is consumed by comprehension. She should practise them in timed pair work with an interlocutor instructed to use one unknown word deliberately. She should also build a habit of paraphrasing around a gap («es cuando...», «es como...») rather than stopping. Naming the strategy in advance reduces the panic that blocked retrieval.
3. In the report-back, M must summarise N's plans accurately. Draft a two-sentence report and explain one accuracy risk.
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Model: «N me ha contado que el sábado va a una quedada con sus amigos del instituto y que después piensa quedarse en casa porque tiene que estudiar.»
Reasoning: the report uses reported-speech framing («me ha contado que») and preserves the future orientation with «va a» and «piensa». The main accuracy risk is tense shift: students often backshift mechanically to the conditional and distort a still-future plan. Here the plan is still ahead, so the present/future forms are correct. A second risk is over-reporting: M must report what N said, not embellish it, since the rubric rewards accurate reporting, and adding details she did not hear would be a factual error.