As a prime example of communicative language teaching and testing, the paired format (a discussion between peers) is widely used in language classrooms and as a test format. This paper draws on an interactional analysis of 27 video recorded paired speaking tests in the final national test in Swedish for immigrants (SFI) and discusses how language testing practices bring different ideologies of language competence to the fore. In this way, testing oral interaction sheds light on tensions made on the ‘nature’ of language competence such as being an individual or relational construct or by framing language as primarily logocentric or an embodied practice (Rydell, 2018). By analyzing the paired speaking tests as staged institutionalized performances that put speaking and ideologies on display (Rydell, 2015), this paper discusses how perceptions and constructions of language competence are regimented metapragmatically as well as interactionally during the test, by, inter alia, sustaining and reproducing a monolingual ideology of language competence during the test event. Considering the increased importance given to testing in migration contexts (Kahn, 2019), it is pertinent to investigate language testing from a sociolinguistic perspective. A sociolinguistic understanding of paired speaking tests adds to our understanding of how the test situation impacts the discourse produced, and ultimately, how testing is a specific social practice leading to the conclusion that interpretations of a student’s language competence solely based on test scores should be treated with caution.