Sequence Organization Of Repair In Senior High School English Teaching:A Conversation Analysis

Conversational repair refers to a set of practices designed for dealing with troubles occurring in speaking,hearing,and understanding.Repairable items refer to anything that have been manifested as troubles by any one of the participants.Given that previous studies have paid much attention to repair occurring in universities and junior high school English classes,it is valuable to explore how the repair is organized in senior high English classes.Besides,without showing detailed conversational evidence,many of the previous studies have focused mainly on the demonstration of the relationship between repair and the elements such as students’ learning capacity and types of class activities in ordinary English lessons.This study analyzes and discusses how teachers adopt verbal and non-verbal practices to cope with the repairable items that have been identified as troubles by students and come to some prototypical structure of repair organization.This research examines how the repair is organized in high-quality English classes using the method of conversation analysis(abbreviated as CA),with which we can acquire empirical data and publicly available ways of repair organization.The conversation analysis is employed as both the theoretical basis and research method of this study.A total number of fifteen English teaching videos were involved in this study.Approximately 675 minutes teacher-student conversation were collected,transcribed,and analyzed.Three questions were proposed in this study:(1)What kind of trouble sources,repair types,and repair strategies can be found in excellent lessons?(2)What are the characteristics of talk-in-interaction in high-quality English classes?(3)How does the turn construction of repair vary during talk-in-interaction?This study drew three results based on research questions.(1)Based on the relations between trouble sources and repair organization,this study recognized phonetic repair,lexical repair,and syntactic repair.This study encodes five types of repair,namely,SSSS,SSTO,TOSS,TOTO,TOSO.From the perspective of the identity distinction in English classrooms,three identifies were recognized: teacher,student as the former interlocutor,and other students as the later speaker.This study identified 8 types of repair strategies,namely,repetition,reformulation,replacement,explanation expansion,code-switching,completion,metalinguistic device,and negation.(2)The characteristics of repair organization include the following six parts: prosodic resources,execution policies for dis-preferred organization,paralinguistic device,consolidation,positive feedback,and non-repair.(3)The variation on the turn construction of repair includes particle-prefaced repair,repetition+particle-prefaced repair,and repair.We argue that English teachers and researchers who have a thorough understanding of English teaching may have more meaningful and thoughtful ideas on this research.There is no denying that the data is continuously updated so that we can’t analyze every repair pattern to demonstrate all possible sequence organizations.With the further advancement of conversation analysis and the combination of different research perspectives,we hope we can have a better understanding of repair organization in English as second language classroom settings.It is hoped that this study can help English teachers in senior high school grasp patterns of effective repair organization,improve the awareness of dealing with students’ learning problems and provide opportunities for students to achieve good language output.