Abstract:
Despite the abundance of research on teachers’ repair practices in language classroom interaction,
there are not enough conversation analytic studies on repair organization with the focus on the
details of interaction in the context of EFL. Drawing on sociocultural and situated learning
theories, this study explores the contingent nature of English language teachers’ organizational
patterns of repair practices (repair focus, repair completion, repair trajectory and convergence) by
adopting the context-dependency of repair as a point of departure. More specifically, we analyzed
two classroom interactional contexts: form-oriented and meaning-oriented contexts as well as
their realization in student participation. Data were collected through video- and audio-tape
recordings of 14 lessons from eight EFL teachers at four private language institutes in Iran and
they were analyzed based on the framework of conversation analysis methodology. The analysis
of lesson transcripts indicated that the teachers varied in their repair practices; however, an
organizational repair pattern emerged from the data. The analysis of qualitative data revealed that
the teachers largely repaired divergently in form-oriented contexts but convergently in meaningoriented contexts, and deployed other-repair more than self-repair. The pedagogical implications of the study are for language teachers’ awareness of the role of repair organization in facilitating learning opportunities and for teachers’ professional development.
Machine summary:
"Drawing on sociocultural and situated learning theories, this study explores the contingent nature of English language teachers’ organizational patterns of repair practices (repair focus, repair completion, repair trajectory and convergence) by adopting the context-dependency of repair as a point of departure.
Conversation analysis; Organizational pattern of repair practices; Other-repair; Self- repair; Form-oriented and meaning-oriented contexts; Context convergence and divergence Keywords: Article Information: Received: 21 July 2016 Revised: 28 January 2017 Accepted: 9 February 2017 Corresponding author: Department of English Language and Literature, Yazd University, Yazd, Iran Email address: hallami@yazd.
One aspect of these practices in English language classrooms, apart from turn-taking and sequencing practices, is repair practices which refer to the various ways of addressing problems in speaking, hearing, or understanding of the talk (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977) and even correcting errors.
The repair sequences were analyzed in terms of these categories for research questions: (a) the repair focus or the repairable; (b) typical repair trajectory (OIOR-ORSR-OROR-SISR); (c) typical participants in the repair (teacher, current student, or peer); (d) types of repair completion (overt/direct/exposed repair or covert/indirect/embedded repair-delegated repair-didactic repair or conversational repair- form- focused repair or content-focused repair); and (e) context convergence or divergence.
In other words, in meaning-oriented contexts, repair techniques involve some form of ‘negotiation’ such as prompts or elicitation (Ammar & Spada, 2006; Lyster, 2004) in order to promote ‘self-discovery’ (Waring, 2015) or they involve interactional feedback (Nassaji, 2015)."