Repair receipts: On their motivation and interactional import

The thesis investigates conversations involving native speakers and non-native speakers of English. The non-native speakers partaking in the study have a well developed knowledge of the foreign language. The study is particularly concerned with the function and interactional relevance of repair strategies that interlocutors employ when they talk to each other. The results of the analyses highlight issues such as participants' self-representations as competent speakers, the notion "nonnativeness", and language learning, relating to current developments within conversation analytic research on second/foreign language conversations. Comparisons between non-native and native speakers are made, highlighting similarities as well as di¡erences in participants' use of repair strategies. The study adopts a conversation analytic framework but is also in¤uenced by studies of second/foreign language acquisition. Conversation analytic research has, until recently, dealt with conversations involving non-native speakers who have a limited or intermediate command of the second/foreign language. Repair behaviours of advanced foreign language users are thus a little investigated area. Whereas non-native speakers with limited experience in using the second/foreign language often employ repair in order to solve problems that are related to their linguistic knowledge, such as ¢nding or knowing words and constructing utterances that are understandable in the context in which they occur, this thesis shows how an increased knowledge of the foreign language involves a shift in focus as repair is carried out, i.e. repair is used to address problems of a linguistic as well as of a social nature. Since an increased knowledge of a foreign language is accompanied by an increase in the range of jobs that repair strategies do, "doing repair" is an important part of the development of non-native speakers' interactional and linguistic competence.

2014

This article analyses instances of repair in the speech of Finnish upper-secondary school students. The material for the study comes from the HY-Talk Corpus, which includes both monologic and dialogic speech by students, collected during a spoken English language test. The analysis shows that in order to cope with problems in their own or their fellow students’ utterances the participants make use of all the repair con! gurations present in everyday conversations. There is also a clear preference for self-initiated self-repair, as has been shown to be the case in naturally occurring talk in interaction. Regardless of the fact that the speech by the students has been elicited for research purposes, it displays mechanisms similar to everyday talk.

Using conversation analysis, this paper describes the function of repeats in spoken German. Its analytic focus is repeats in third position to two-part sequences. Such sequence-expanding repeats do not (primarily) initiate repair; instead, they present and explicitly register just-retrieved, new, or corrected information. We discuss two sequential environments: information request sequences and repair sequences. Each is associated with a different sequence-initiating and sequence-expanding turn format: (1) Third-position repeats in repair sequences are typically followed by additional elements, either in the same or in the next turn. Specifically, word searches formatted as wh-questions receive repeats in third position, typically accompanied by additional claims of understanding. Repair sequences that include corrections typically receive free-standing repeats in third position, but these require co-participant's confirmation and thus engender a minimal expansion sequence.

Journal of Pragmatics, 1997

Based on video-taped multiperson conversation, this paper examines interactional achievements of affiliation and disaffiliation among conversationalists in spates of talk in which trouble in hearing or understanding is negotiated. In particular, this report focuses on three aspects of other-initiated repair unique to the multiperson setting. (1) In multiperson interaction, repair can be initiated by more than one speaker on the same trouble-source. Such a succession of repair initiation turns by different speakers shows a momentary affiliation to the repair initiation speaker. (2) Usually, the trouble-source turn speaker responds to the repair initiation. In multiperson interaction, a person other than the trouble-source turn speaker can respond before the trouble-source turn speaker's attempt to fix the trouble. In such instances, other coparticipants employ action:~ which display that such conduct is inappropriate if there is no apparent justification. (3) Initiating repair can be used as an entry and exit device to a conversation and to transformations; in the participation framework from a single conversation to two simultaneous conversations (schisming) as well as to return from schisming to a single conversation (merging).

Interactional repair usually involves one or two primary participants, meaning that either the speaker of a trouble source attempts to deal with it on his or her own or else a recipient initiates the repair and sometimes provides a candidate solution. However, occasionally a third person may also become involved in a form of repair that has been called ‘brokering’. Such brokers mediate the talk, providing the primary recipient with assistance in dealing with the trouble, particularly in cases where the recipient is an L2 speaker. Brokering therefore momentarily reconstitutes the participant constellation and invokes relevant identity categories and epistemic hierarchies. Adopting a Conversation Analytic approach, I build on this line of inquiry by examining a collection of cases in which a novice speaker of English appeals to a third person for brokering, highlighting sequential, embodied and epistemic features of the talk in both successful and aborted bids for brokering. The data are taken from a corpus of multi-party dinner table talk video-recorded in a homestay context.

csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu

Repairs -the various ways in which people edit and reformulate conversational turns-are a characteristic feature of natural dialogue. However, relatively little is known about their overall frequency or distribution in conversation. We present a systematic, quantitative study of patterns of repair in two corpora: 'ordinary' dialogues from the British National Corpus (BNC) and task-oriented dialogues from the HCRC Map Task. We use this analysis to evaluate three hypotheses about patterns of repair 1) social 'preferences' 2) processing demands and 3) dialogue co-ordination. The results show that repair is more frequent in task-oriented dialogue, that use of repair is broadly unaffected by familiarity or mode of interaction but substantially affected by task roles. We argue that the complimentary patterns of repair used by conversational partners support the view of repairs as an integrated, cross-turn and cross-person, system for sustaining the mutual-intelligibility of dialogue.

Research on Language & Social Interaction, 2013

ABSTRACT

2017

Through conversational analysis CA of video recordings of interactions that took place in the U K between a Japanese speaker and local English speakers this paper demonstrates the richness of such data specifically in terms of repair practices in which verbal and non verbal actions work in coordination to arrive at satisfactory repair outcomes The three extracts presented contain extended repair sequences from living room conversations between native NS and non native NNS speakers of English that occurred during a home visit All three repair sequences arise essentially as other initiated self repair in order to deal with temporary problems in understanding However each sequence develops in a different way leading respectively to 1 an embedded pronunciation drill 2 an extended topicalization of the trouble source and 3 re organization of discourse structure for an inquiry There was no elaborate use of gestures but non verbal behavior nonetheless played a significant role in the co constructed interactional management of repair in each case Finally the potential use of such data in EFL conversation instruction is briefly discussed KEY WORDS L2 conversation intercultural communication teaching materials conversation analysis non-verbal repair The nature of the ability to interact competently in a second language L2 and how it is developed have been researched from varying perspectives. One such area of research has involved the application of conversation analysis CA , which has a social, qualitative and emic approach to the micro-analysis of naturally occurring talk-in-interaction, and deals with features and processes such as turn-construction, turn-taking, sequence structure, conversational repair, topic management, story-telling and identities in discourse. L2 interactional data for CA have been collected in wide range of situations, including lessons in classrooms Richards, 2006 , one-on-one tutoring sessions Seo, 2011 , elicited but informal "conversation for learning" sessions Burch, 2014 , Internet chat rooms Jenks, 2013 , and outside classrooms in real service encounters and business communications Theodórsdóttir, 2011a, 2011b. In addition, multimedia technology has facilitated increased research interest in the role of non-verbal behavior-gaze, gesture, body orientation, material objects-in face-to-face interaction e.g.

Discourse Studies, 2015

This article studies the Conversation Analysis (CA) of self-initiated repair structures in everyday conversations in Jordanian Spoken Arabic (JSA). It aims to cast light on self-initiated repairs practised by Jordanians. The data were collected in 2010; 18 dyadic-videotaped conversations totalling about nine hours, mixed and single-sex, were conducted at Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan. The data analysed include 1595 self-initiated repairs. The CA approach is employed as a theoretical framework for this study. The findings of this research indicate that Jordanian speakers practise 10 self-initiated repair structures, namely, expansion, hesitation, replacement, repetition, abort and restart, abort and abandon, insertion, deletion, meta-repair and modify order.