A Study Of Teachers’ Conversational Repair Strategies In Junior EFL Classes

Conversational repair is the adjustment in interaction between speakers and hearers.It is similar to error correction,but is more than error correction.Correction refers to the replacement of an error or a mistake by the correct linguistic form;repair,however,deals with any trouble in the conversation.The function of correction is to make something correct,while repair aims to make something appropriate in a certain context.If English teachers in junior middle schools can apply repair strategies appropriately,it can greatly improve the quality of language input in class,which will in turn benefit students’ comprehensible output.However,studies of conversation repair in the junior middle school English classes are not complete yet.This study aims to probe into the repair phenomenon that occurs during English class interactions in junior middle schools.Different from the the previous studies,this study aims to conduct a mixed-methods study on repair strategies used by English teachers.It tries to find out what kinds of strategies are used in junior EFL classes,how these strategies are adopted to deal with students’ major trouble sources and the impacts these strategies have on classroom interaction.This research is conducted in a junior middle school in Shanghai and the linguistic data comes from fifteen classroom videos.The total length of the video is about 600 minutes.The findings are as follows:1.The repair strategies in middle school English classes can be divided into direct repair strategies and indirect repair strategies.Direct repair strategies include correction and negation;indirect repair strategies include code-switching,repetition,explanation,completion,reconstruction,metalinguistic prompt and paralinguistic device.2.Students in junior middle schools may encounter different kinds of trouble sources,namely,linguistic troubles,pragmatic troubles,strategic troubles,discourse troubles,and fluency troubles.The linguistic troubles are the most frequent ones,which include troubles in pronunciation,vocabulary and syntax.Since differenttrouble sources have their own distinctive features,thus they deserve different repair strategies.3.Indirect repair strategies play a more important role in promoting classroom participation and increasing the frequency of class turn-taking.Also,indirect repair strategies can strengthen students’ learning motivation and build up their self-confidence better than direct repair strategies.It is hoped that this research can help English teachers in junior middle schools have a better understanding on the conversational repair and provide them with some references.