Conversational Repair as a Role‐Defining Mechanism in Classroom Interaction

Abstract

This article is concerned with the ways in which the students and the teacher in a contentbased German as a foreign language class used repair in order to negotiate meaning and form in their classroom. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches, we discuss how repair in this institutional setting differed from repair in mundane conversation and how repair was used differently by the students and the teacher. Given that students and the teacher were all competent speakers of both the first language (L1) and the second language (L2), we found that these differences were not merely indications of incomplete L2 usage. Instead, they manifested how the students and the teacher enacted and perceived their respective roles within the classroom and, based on role concepts, demonstrated different access to repair as a resource. The analysis shows that repair is a resource for modified output as well as modified input in classroom settings. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

Teacher repair in a second language class for low-literate adults

“…Few of these, however, narrow down and pay attention to a specific learner group's characteristics, except for aforementioned Liebscher & Dailey-O'Cain's (2003) research on repair by advanced L2 learners. Although Cho (2008) and Seong (2004) account for types and distributions of repair strategies depending on ESL grade levels, their results are rather taxonomic, which therefore might not fully explicate the way the participants display to one another their orientation to the L2 classroom repair.…”

“…This topic also merits attention to extend our knowledge of repair by and for widely defined types of language learners. Liebscher and Dailey-O'Cain's (2003) focused interest in advanced L2 learners in their repair study, for example, implies that different L2 learner groups may develop and benefit from different repair trajectories. At the other extreme of language proficiency, this paper explores the context-sensitive mechanisms that low-literate adults find appropriate for identifying and resolving breakdowns in their English as a second language (ESL) classroom talk.…”

Topic continuity in informal conversations between native and non-native speakers of English

“…Research into NNS discourse has tended to concentrate on various institutional contexts, such as business (Gimenez 2001;Fung 2007), medical encounters (Cameron & Williams 1999;Frank 2000) and education (Fung & Carter 2007;Jenkins 2004;Liebscher & Dailey-O'Cain 2003), whereas NNS participation in informal, social interactions has been comparatively neglected. In line with other researchers (e.g.…”

Germanachandachsoin repair uptake: Resources to sustain or remove epistemic asymmetry

“…1 In addition to these studies mostly conducted on ordinary conversation, there is also work that looks at the form and function of repair in other settings such as city administration offices (Selting 1987c), the language classroom (Liebscher & Dailey-O'Cain 2003), proficiency interviews (Egbert 1998;Kasper & Ross 2001), and bilingual communication (Egbert 2002;Rieger 2003).…”