The goal of this volume is to provide a rich, interdisciplinary foundation of empirical studiesdescribing the discourse of Language Proficiency Interviews (LPIs), focusing on“interactional competence.” The studies not only show how difficult it is to validlyassess oral proficiency; they also show that discourse analysis of LPIs—as the editors pointout—is very much in its infancy. Most of these studies face research design challenges(e.g., small sample size, sample comparability, coding reliability, or a combination of these), yetthey illustrate the potential contributions of various (mostly qualitative) discourse analyticapproaches to an understanding and assessment of oral proficiency.