Abstract
This study examines repair practice by English as a Foreign Language ( EFL) college students to address the understanding problems that may cause communication breakdowns in classroom conversations. Conversational data were elicited from 40 second-semester students performing jigsaw and information gap communicative tasks. Using the conversation analysis theory and methodological approach, the recorded and transcribed conversations were analyzed to scrutinize the frequency and types of repair strategies, trouble sources, and repair outcomes. The findings show that to address the understanding problem, the EFL college students employed 11 other-initiated repair strategies: Open-class or unspecified strategies; WH-interrogatives; Partial repeat plus WH- interrogatives; Repetition or partial repetition; Candidate understanding; Correction; Request for repetition; Non-verbal; Asking for definition, explanation, translation, example, or spelling; Explicit display of non-understanding; and Request to speak up. These other-initiated repair strategies were triggered by the presence of lexical, semantic content-related, and sequential/speech delivery trouble sources. Attempts to resolve the understanding problem were conducted by a set of repair outcomes, including Repetition, Acknowledgment, Repetition or acknowledgment plus expansion, explanation, and/or translation, and Repetition or acknowledgment plus translation. The study provides language educators with new insights on how EFL learners deal with understanding problems in communication so that they could respond appropriately to the repair practice initiated by the students.
Highlights
IntroductionAccording to Gardner (2013), studying repair in classroom interactions from a CA perspective is only about a decade in age, and that what people have done so far is only “scratching the surface” (p.610).While some studies (Bae & Oh, 2013; Bolden, 2012) on classroom repair have shown the similarities and differences with ordinary interactions, there is still a need to find out different types of repair in classroom conversations and how the learners change from a lower level to a higher level through the repair process (Gardner, 2013).The current study, attempted to scrutinize other-initiated repair ( OIR) as one of the strategies that EFL students use to address the understanding problem in their classroom conversations using the CA angle.This is a common phenomenon that many EFL learners still face when encountering problems in their interactions with their peers or with native speakers of English due to their lack of ability to deploy necessary repair strategies to address such understanding problems
The study shows that EFL students in Indonesia managed to employ eleven OIR strategies to deal with understanding problems during classroom conversations.The OIR strategies in the current study are different from the ones in Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks (1977) and Wong and Waring (2010) who proposed eight OIR types: Open-class or unspecified, WH-interrogative, Partly repeating the trouble source plus WH-interrogative, (Partial) repetition of the problem, Candidate understanding, Correction repair strategy,Request for repetition, and Non-verbal repair strategy
While all those categories appeared in the EFL learners’ conversations in the current study, new categories of OIR types emerged.The new categories were Asking for definition/ explanation/ translation/ example/ or spelling; Explicit display of non-understanding; and Request to speak up.The higher frequency of OIR strategies in these EFL students’ conversations indicated that they may have more problems understanding during the course of a conversation due to their limited proficiency in English as language learners.it should be acknowledged that the students were at the beginning level, they managed to employ the OIR strategies to deal with such understanding problems in classroom conversations
Summary
According to Gardner (2013), studying repair in classroom interactions from a CA perspective is only about a decade in age, and that what people have done so far is only “scratching the surface” (p.610).While some studies (Bae & Oh, 2013; Bolden, 2012) on classroom repair have shown the similarities and differences with ordinary interactions, there is still a need to find out different types of repair in classroom conversations and how the learners change from a lower level to a higher level through the repair process (Gardner, 2013).The current study, attempted to scrutinize other-initiated repair ( OIR) as one of the strategies that EFL students use to address the understanding problem in their classroom conversations using the CA angle.This is a common phenomenon that many EFL learners still face when encountering problems in their interactions with their peers or with native speakers of English due to their lack of ability to deploy necessary repair strategies to address such understanding problems Studying this phenomenon would add to our understanding of how learning a foreign language occurs as learners’ endeavor to achieve shared understanding during their interactions. Both studies see language learners’ as non-native speakers or deficient language users as something that sequentially evolves through the interaction process.Through their practice of using OIR, language learners are enacting their identities as non-native speakers
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