A Study Of Learner Repair And Language Acquisition In Teacher-Student Dyadic Interaction

Learner repair mainly occurs in classroom interaction(McHoul 1990;Nassaji 2011;Shehadeh 2001)and has a positive role in language learning.Recently,an increasing number of researchers have been devoted to the study of the effectiveness of learner repair on learning targeted forms in classroom interaction.The present study explores the role of learner repair following corrective feedback in learning targeted forms and the effectiveness of different types of repair on learning targeted forms in teacher-student dyadic interaction.It aims at addressing the following two questions:1)What is the relationship between learner repair in response to corrective feedbackduring interaction and learning the targeted forms as measured after interaction?2)Are there any differences between self-repair and teacher-generated repair andbetween repetition and incorporation in learning targeted forms?30 adult EFL freshmen from a university in Jiangsu Province voluntarily took part in the study.The study was conducted in the teacher-student dyadic interaction which was audio-recorded and then transcribed.The study lasted for three weeks,and it included a pretest,a story-telling task,an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test.The major findings of the present study are as follows.The present study revealed that learner repair in response to corrective feedback during interaction had a positive effect on learning targeted forms after interaction.In both immediate post-test and delayed post-test,self-repair and teacher-generated repair had effects on learning targeted forms,the effectiveness of teacher-generated repair was sustained over two weeks,especially teacher-generated repair involving incorporation rather than repetition;while the effectiveness of self-repair reduced significantly.Nevertheless,self-repair was more effective than teacher-generated repair.Incorporation was more effective than repetition.Besides,the study found that teacher-generated repair was more effective for lexical error than self-repair;while self-repair was more effective for grammatical error than teacher-generated repair.The present study provided some useful pedagogical implications for teachers to maximize the effectiveness of learner repair on language learning.Firstly,in terms of learners' lexical and grammatical errors,teachers should provide corresponding types of corrective feedback for learners to produce targeted forms in class.Secondly,it was highly recommended that teachers should use various corrective feedback to give chances for students to correct their errors on their own.Thirdly,teachers should make corrective feedback more explicit and salient to add its value in class.