“That's Wrong”: Repair and Rapport in Culturally Diverse Higher Education Classrooms

Abstract

Drawing on video‐recorded classroom interactions and interviews with tutors, this study investigates what considerations for rapport motivate tutors' repair strategies in two culturally diverse higher education classes in the UK: an Oral Skills class from an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programme and an undergraduate Accounting class. The analysis shows that repair initiations in the Oral Skills class tend to be made off‐record, be mitigated, and generally lead either to student self‐repair or other‐repair by a class member, while repair initiations in the Accounting class tend to occur close to the trouble spot, be direct and explicit, and often lead to other‐repair by the tutor. What is common to both classes is that the tutors foreground a collective frame of reference to protect the group's equity and association rights at the partial expense of their own and individual students' face claims. Because this article can only show the general relationship between repair strategies and rapport considerations, it is suggested that studies on classroom interaction need to systematically explore classroom practices in different subject areas and educational environments in which English is used as the language of communication. This will further our understanding of different norms of classroom interaction and inform the teaching of EAP.