Language and Culture in Undergraduate Admissions Interviews

This Element explores the intersection of language and culture in undergraduate admissions interviews. Such encounters are commonly understood through their outcomes, typically via perceptions of interviewer bias and/or candidates' levels of self-confidence. This study challenges such a reductive understanding of admissions interviews by positing them instead as communicative events with interactional requirements that can be empirically determined. Based on a corpus of 60 interviews provided by the University of Cambridge, the study draws on the tools of interactional sociolinguistics to reveal how interviews are shaped by multiple layers of cultural norms, and role relationships, that successful candidates are best able to navigate. In so doing, it suggests that admissions interviews are not 'interviews' per se, but rather 'tutorial auditions' in which candidates must quickly demonstrate both their academic competences and their ability to learn and to be taught. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.