A Study Of Repairs In English Learners’ Conversational Interactions

Conversational repair is a frequent phenomenon in conversational interaction, whichrefers to practices for dealing with problems or troubles in speaking, hearing, andunderstanding the talk in conversation. Repair as an important part of conversationalconstructions, is an indispensible way to remove the trouble and keep on the talk inconversation. For this reason, repair has attracted much attention of researchers indiscourse study and second language acquisition. With the development of the second andforeign language teaching theories, the role of repair in second language classroom hasaroused the interest of some scholars, who have more focused on it in teachersconversation or teacher-student conversation, while the study of repairs in learner-learnerinteractions have been paid little attention to, especially for the English learners in ourcountry.In order to explore English learners repair patterns, repair features and repairfunctions in classroom language learning in China, this study analyzes the interactiveconversations of sophomore English majors in class by using the framework ofconversation analysis, combined with quantitative analysis. This empirical study is thestage achievements of a part of the study from a longitudinal and large research project.The participants are sophomore English majors from an ordinary university in Hu Nanprovince. The data are collected through both video-taping and audio-taping. The sourcesof data last19h, and1206repair cases are collected for our analysis.The present study produces a number of important findings based on conversationanalysis. Firstly, there are four types of repair in English learners spoken interactions,namely self-initiated self-repair, other-initiated self-repair, self-initiated other-repair, andother-initiated other-repair. In the data self-initiated self-repair outnumbers other repairpatterns. And as for the initiation placement of self-initiated self-repair, the same turn, turntransition place and the third turn are probed into and elaborated. Furthermore, according to different trouble sources, this study finds that there are lexical repair, phonetic repairand syntactic repair in learner-learner interactions, in which lexical repair outnumbersother two types. And the study finds that there are two kinds of repair effects: success andfailure, with the success at repair being gained most. Secondly, statistical analyses arecarried out to identify the repair features of learner-learner interactions. The preference ofrepair in learner-learner interactions is almost similar to the preference by Schegloff,Jefferson and Sacks(1977). Moreover, findings from our analysis indicate that learnersprefer to use self-initiation repair rather than other-initiation repair, which is different fromSJS s findings. Thirdly, based on the existed classification of repair strategies and theparticular data in our study, repair strategies of learner-learner interactions have beenproposed, that is repetition, completion, reformulation, code-switching, explanation andother strategies. Of these six strategies, the first five strategies belong to verbal repairs,while the study also finds that there are nonverbal repairs, namely gestures. The number ofrepetition as one of repair strategies comes out to the top, which is related to the featuresand the functions of repetition. Code-switching as a kind of repair strategies is a tentativeclassification. Fourthly, this study further analyzes that repair has some functions in thelearners second language acquisition, which includes the functions of discourse,interaction and language acquisition. Besides, it indicates that three influencing factorswill affect the repair patterns, that is classroom context, interactive tasks and learnersindividual differences.Findings of the present study can not only add to the existing body of work onconversational repair in classroom interactions, but provide some implications for foreignlanguage teaching. However, the present study only analyzes the sophomore Englishmajors, so the results obtained leave much to be verified and improved.