A conversation analysis of students' self-repair in an English class

Adopting a conversation analytic methodology, this research describes and analyses the interactional practice of 'repair' in an undergraduate EFL classroom. Repair is the "self-righting mechanism" in social interaction to deal with recurrent problems in speaking, hearing, and understanding (Schegloff et al., 1977). This study focuses on the occurrences where the trouble sources are addressed and repairs are interactionally resolved by the students themselves, self-initiated self-repair (SISR). More specifically, it examines how students resolve their troubles within their turns of talk, 'same-turn repair'. The research draws upon transcriptions of approximately 150 minutes of video/audio recordings of 15 non-English major students' classroom interaction during a role-play group discussion task. The data yielded 133 SISR cases where 129 occurrences of same-turn repair, 3 third-turn repairs, and only 1 transition-space repair were found. Following 10 operations of same-turn SISR given by Schegloff (2013), this study has found that 9 repair practices were adopted by the students. Replacing repair was utilized significantly by the students, followed by searching, recycling, inserting, and aborting respectively. While the repair operations of parenthesizing, reformatting, deleting, and reordering were quite rare, sequence-jumping was absent in this study. The second major findings show that the students' interactional practice of same-turn SISR is through various patterns of repair initiators. This includes the majority of non-lexical perturbation/hesitation markers ("ah", "uh", "uhm") and short pauses, followed by repetition of the lexical items in progress and cutting-off of an utterance or sound respectively. Generally, these four types of repair initiators are used in word search. Additionally, epistemic markers ("I mean", " I think") and change-of-state tokens ("so", "oh", "no") emerged as random initiators leading to replacing repairs. The findings suggest that despite their possible limited linguistic proficiency, the students are interactional competent individuals who make use of various repair strategies as interactional resources to resolve the anticipating communication problems in order to facilitate their group discussion and to accomplish the task.