Other-initiated repair and preference principles in an oral classroom

Abstract

This study explores how the conversational principles of minimization and progressivity are observed in an oral classroom for deaf or hard-of-hearing (D/HH) preschoolers, a setting almost entirely designed to develop students' speech skills and get them to “use their words” as much as possible. Using Conversation Analysis, I examine teacher-student talk and find that the use of other-initiated repair is one predominant method for eliciting students' speech. In particular, acceptability repairs were routinely used to target the modality and minimal formulations of students' responses to the teacher's first-actions, yielding preferences for vocalization and maximization. However, following these preferences subverts certain norms associated with minimization and responding in ordinary conversation, which presents a potential practical dilemma of exposing D/HH children to the social norms of their oral classroom while also preparing them for interactions in mainstream society. I propose acceptability repair as a pedagogical tool of the oral classroom and illustrate how repair machinery can be mobilized to accomplish particular goals, as well as how preference principles taken from an ordinary to an institutional setting can acquire new interactional meaning under the conditions of a specific social context. Data draws from 20 h of video-recordings in one classroom in Southern California.