Exploring the felt correspondence of socially-distanced salsa with online language testing: A challenge for claims of gestural "loss", "impossibility", and "non-existence" in applied linguistics

In one of the many video clips that went viral during the pandemic, “When you wanna salsa but also socially distance” shows a couple of dancers busting out beautifully coordinated salsa moves to Cuban sounds, avoiding dermal contact and maintaining their distance with what look like strings or elastic bands. It is to ‘lived experience’ that I owe a perceived correspondence (Ingold, 2021) of this scene with the practice in education of language testing online. When the candidates in my comparative study took the Cambridge B2 First Speaking Paper, they said that “distance”, “feeling”, “intimacy”, and “involvement” all change when their examiner is online—as if taking the test over Zoom had introduced a kind of string or elastic band to their relational dynamics. However, this correspondence will seem bizarre to researchers in fields traditionally associated with online language testing. Despite the emphasis in applied linguistics on the meaningful situation of being with others, a close-reading of their concepts like functional output, interactional competence, and multimodality reveals ways of relating phenomena that neglect lived experience. How is it that applied linguistics studies, for example, are finding that our gestures in the online environment are ‘almost non-existent’ (Bobkina et al., 2023) or ‘may simply not be possible’ (Nakatsuhara et al., 2017)? I draw on contemporary phenomenological thinkers (including Di Paolo, Cuffari, & De Jaegher, 2018; Fuchs, 2011; Ingold, 2021; Sheets-Johnstone, 2011; Thibault, 2021) to bring out what intuitively registers rhythmically and bodily in different ways in the online environment, offering empirical examples of ‘kinaesthetic melodies’ and ‘felt-anticipatory dynamics’ (Thibault, 2021). These kinds of gestures would be obvious in the tensions that strings (or elastic bands) generate between dance partners. They can offer ways of rethinking language proficiency in the normative domain of language testing and assessment online.