a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Available online 26 November 2014
Keywords:
Conversation analysis
Repair
Classroom discourse
English as a second language
Low-literate adults
a b s t r a c t
This paper complicates the practice of teacher repair in the second language (L2) classroom
by specically focusing on the subset of adult English learners who have a background of low
literacy. Using Conversation Analysis, this study explores the interactional means locally
available for the low-literate learners to deal with teacher repair in the activity of vocabulary
introduction. The analysis shows that the organization of teacher repair is oriented to the
learners state of literacy, which for the teacher holds priority over what the literature has
found as repair strategies sui generis either inside or outside the L2 classroom. The teacher
protably tailors her (para)linguistic input for the learners to perceive and react to her
repair, and this rule-governed turn construction helps them identify the pedagogical intent
of each turn. These ndings will enrich the discussion of whether our existing knowledge
of L2 repair can be extended to all learners.
2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
These learners are to be distinguished from literate learners at a beginner level of ESL, who are familiar with basic skills
of reading and writing language as a semiotic system (Bigelow, 2010; Moore, 2007). ESL learners with low print literacy
also depart from native speakers (NS) of English with low literacy (Eme, 2011) in that they need to practice speaking and
listening to English as a new language as well as reading and writing. In this respect, the pre- or low-literate students in ESL
classes are primarily immigrants who recently arrived in the Anglosphere and whose background of L1 illiteracy may result
from a number of reasons: ones schooling might be severely disrupted before entering the host country, or ones ethnic
group might traditionally prefer oral language performances such as stories or poems to literacy, compared to the prevailing
chirographic culture in most developed countries (Ong, 1988, p. 2).
L2 researchers have called for more studies on this particular learner group in response to an exploding migrant population, the majority of whom is coming to the rst-world countries where English language skills are essential for everyday
life (e.g. Dooley & Thangaperumal, 2011; Strube, 2010; Tarone, 2010; Wrigley, 2007; see also proceedings of Low Educated
Second Language and Literacy Acquisition for Adults symposia, available at: http://www.leslla.org). Investigating adult L2
learners with limited print literacy or formal schooling is an important and thoughtful move because they have been largely
understudied compared to school-age or higher-educated immigrants. There is evidence that pre-literate and low-literate
adults acquire the oral processing of an L2 differently than literate learners, with little awareness of linguistic units like
words and phonemes (Tarone, Bigelow, & Hansen, 2009). These authors nding indicates that our current understanding of
how the human mind acquires L2s may be in fact merely based on data from some humans (the literate ones) (Tarone &
Bigelow, 2011, p. 6, emphases in original). The eld of second language acquisition (SLA) must include learners alphabetic
literacy level and interrupted education in its research agenda for a more comprehensive and ecological theory-building.
It is of particular value to examine the practice of repair that occurs in low-literate adults language classes and how
it is distinct from repair in classes for other learner groups or outside the classroom. In their ESL classroom contexts, the
asymmetry of language competence is greatest between an NS teacher of English and her students. What is considered
repairable in this situation will predominantly be language problems made by learners, who are positioned at an extreme
of not-yet-competent interactants in the literate and English-speaking social world (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977, p.
381). Therefore, L2 classes for low-literate adults are likely to have a particular repair trajectory, where the teacher helps the
learners carry out smooth interactions, by both initiating and completing repairs toward their silence, cut-off or try-marking
utterances, as presented in the following example:
Teacher:
Student:
Teacher:
Exploring how low-literate L2 learners navigate teacher repair in the classroom environment is also meaningful because
their access to repair as a resource determines how they modify L2 input and output, which may contribute to language
development (Hardy & Moore, 2004). By constantly adjusting what is said (trouble source) and what is heard (repair), the
learners notice the linguistic gap between the two, which is central to the acquisition of a language (Doughty & Williams,
1998). Prior to identifying such a connection between repair and language learning, this paper investigates how trouble is
repaired in L2 classes for learners with low literacy. To examine the detailed fabric of talk surrounding repair using their
own perspective, this study utilizes conversation analysis (CA) as a methodological framework, which will be outlined in
the following subsections.
Repair in the L2 classroom
Transparent and smooth communication is built on a conversational mechanism that breaks through what is obstructed
and claries what is cloudy. Dened as practices for dealing with problems or troubles in speaking, hearing, and [. . .]
understanding what someone has just said (Schegloff, 2000, p. 207), repair is one of the most ubiquitous events in human
interaction. Repair in the L2 classroom environment, among others, has been comprehensively investigated under the category of institutional talk (Drew & Heritage, 1992). The consensus among those studies is that the institutional or professional
identities assigned to each participant constrain the organization of repair and hence result in certain features of L2 classroom repair sui generis (Drew & Heritage, 1992, p. 4). The effect of such contextualized repair is the transmission of L2
knowledge, as Iles (1996) states that language is demonstrated, experienced, and worked on by both teacher and learner
in repair trajectories in L2 classroom discourse (p. 25).
Kasper (1985) represents one of the early efforts to explore the interaction between repair and L2 classroom contexts.
Explaining the repair organization in language-centered and content-centered phases of foreign language lessons, the author
shows that the dominant type of repair and the teachers goal correspond to which phase the class belongs to: more otherrepairs appear in language-centered phases and more self-repairs in content-centered phases. Seedhouse (1997, 2004)
moves a step beyond Kasper by focusing on various pedagogical contexts of L2 classes that dene what is repairable: formand-accuracy, meaning-and-uency, and task-oriented contexts. The pedagogical focus of each context is related reexively
to the organization of repair. Similarly, van Lier (1988) examines pedagogy as a key factor that differentiates the way repair is
dealt with in the L2 classroom from that in non-pedagogic settings. And this is why other-repair prevails in the L2 classroom,
whereas self-repair dominates in daily conversation.
Other L2 repair studies have revisited Kasper, Seedhouse, and/or van Liers works by examining interaction between
NSNNS (Hellermann, 2009; Hosoda, 2006; Wong, 2000), NNSNNS (Kasanga, 1996) or teacher-led classroom interaction
Table 1
The cross-cutting organization of IRE and repair.
Turn
Speaker
IRF
1
2
3
4
Teacher
Student
Teacher
Student
Initiation
Response
Feedback
Repair
Trouble source
Repair initiation
Repair completion
(in addition to the works cited in the rst sentence of this paper, Cho, 2008; Iles, 1996; Juvonen, 1989; Seong, 2004). Few
of these, however, narrow down and pay attention to a specic learner groups characteristics, except for aforementioned
Liebscher & Dailey-OCains (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.
The primary concern of this paper is to explore deviations from the existing literature on L2 classroom repair when the
learner group is limited into the low-literate adults. As Tarone (2010) laments, they are one of the most understudied in
the eld of SLA. They are not ready to speak out much yet and when they do, their use of L2 is telegraphic with one or two
words at best. Thus, it is the teacher who apparently shapes the interaction in this setting, and this teacher-centeredness
has been broadly explored along with the conventional sequence of teacher initiation-student response-teacher feedback
in classroom discourse research.
CA for reframing IRF
As stated earlier, the classroom environment nds more other-repairs than ordinary conversation, and this feature is
attributed to pedagogy as an occasion that the participants are oriented to in this particular context. Indeed, McHoul (1990)
shows that 55 percent of the repair sequences in his corpus consist of three turn constructional units as follows (p. 352):
Turn 1:
Turn 2:
Turn 3:
According to McHoul, the teacher elicits student self-correction in Turn 3 by delaying strategies such as cluing or question
reformulations in Turn 2.1 That is, to maximize the opportunity for the student self-repair, the teachers repair initiation
is placed in the third slot of Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) convention (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975; Initiation-ReplyEvaluation in Mehan, 1979). Informed by Macbeths (2004) reformulation of McHouls (1990) idea, Table 1 exhibits the
relationship between IRF and repair sequences.
Putting the two schemata together, Macbeth (2004) demonstrates that repair is relevant with an instructional goal
towards which the teacher and the students orient themselves in classroom discourse. The repair sequence and the IRF
sequence are concurrent but distinctive, although the former is relevant throughout the latter (Macbeth, 2004, p. 719,
emphasis in original). The three-part IRF sequence has been one of the paradigmatic exchanges of turns observed in classroom
discourse (Cazden, 2001; Hall, 1998; Hellermann, 2003; Nassaji & Wells, 2000; Nystrand, 1997; Seedhouse, 1996; Wells,
1993). This formulaic pattern as a lens to look into classroom talk, however, was not without criticism; Drew and Heritage
(1992), for instance, point out that the IRF model fails to specify how participants show their orientations to the particular
institutional context due to its simplistic formulation. Waring (2009) argues that more learning opportunities can exist
outside the normative IRF sequences, which are tightly chained to one another within the same exercise, offering few
spaces in between for student agency (p. 807).
What Macbeth (2004), Drew and Heritage (1992), and Waring (2009) share in common methodologically is the use or
recommendation of CA, a ne-grained tool to examine the speakers own perspectives and changing identities manifested
in talk-in-interaction. The CA framework complicates the IRF model by focusing on the sequential development of speakers
collaborative effort in managing interactional problems. CA-oriented research also sheds wider light on learning opportunities and learner agency in and around the IRF exchange by looking at members methods for repair, which are indigenous,
interactionally-dened structural units of language (Hellermann, 2009, p. 128).
This paper joins this line of research, noting that CA is of benet in particular to highlight the complexity and dynamicity
of the low-literate learners L2 interaction. Their conversation in language-learning environments may not be lexically
rich, because of the extreme lack of L2 knowledge; every conversation is socially rich, however, with the participants full
engagement in the logical sequencing of verbal and bodily actions and reactions to others. Here the social means, as Erickson
(1982) denes citing Weber (1978), action taken in account of the actions of others (p. 155). Thus, what this article focuses
on through CA is not a lexicalized straightjacket (Huth, 2011, p. 300), but the interactional means locally available to the
participants that fulll the practice of repair in the context of L2 learning.
Analyzing ve instances where a teacher and low-literate English learners recognize and resolve trouble sources surrounding a vocabulary introduction activity, this article reports two unique structural traits: (1) the recursive pattern of
initiation-response-feedback-repetition of feedback (henceforth IRFF ) and (2) the distant but corresponding relationship
between the rst and the fourth slots of IRFF . In addition, this article explores four ways of teacher repair particularly
oriented to the learners low literacy: (1) the teachers straightforward repair without allowing any student to make an
attempt to repair, (2) one-word elicitation of the pedagogical focus, (3) multiple rounds of repair with multifaceted linguistic approach and the moment of teachers laissez-faire decision, and (4) the teachers shifting treatment of her students
between a cohort and individual speakers of trouble sources.
Methodology
The naturally-occurring conversations were video-recorded in an ESL class offered by a 501(c)(3) nonprot organization
in an American Midwestern city, once a week for 130 min for eight weeks. Funded by the citys foundation and a contract
with the county, several NGOs in the city support newly-arrived adult refugees admitted to the United States from overseas
refugee camps. The ESL program is one of the free services they offer. An American teacher had taught the observed class as a
volunteer for eight months at the point of data collection, with the English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) certicate
obtained after her retirement as a librarian. All the students in her class were refugees over the age 25 whose level of alphabet
literacy was low. Their literacy level had been diagnosed by a placement interview. According to the programs placement
criteria, students at the low level know fewer than 50 English words and how to pronounce and write the Roman alphabets.
They may not know, however, how to combine alphabets to make a particular sound and pronounce unfamiliar vocabulary.
The class had four Ethiopians, two Somalis, and one Burundi. The period for which the students had been in the United
States varied from several months to two years. Appendix 1 displays how each participants pseudonym is abbreviated in
the transcripts of this paper.
I unobtrusively sat in the left front corner of the classroom, taking eld notes and video-recording the conversation with a
camera on a tripod from ve-minute before the class starts to ve-minute after the class is over. Watching the videos carefully
and repeatedly, I extracted random samples of repair from each lesson and activity for initial analysis. Of seven activities
observed in eight sessions in total (i.e. greetings, guided dialogs, vocabulary, writing, games, tests, small talk), I decided
to focus on the activity of vocabulary introduction and the sequential development of repair in it.2 Re-watching all the
scenes of vocabulary introduction in the movie, I found 54 repair episodes and transcribed them following CA transcription
conventions (Jefferson, 2004) (see Appendix 2). Through this method, as Hutchby and Wooftt (2008) note, the transcript is
considered as a representation . . . of a determinate social event, which is, in this paper, the practice of repair (p. 70). Beyond
this, I interviewed the teacher of the observed class after completing the data collection to member-check my understanding
of classroom activity procedures and foci. Another follow-up interview was conducted with an Oromo-English interpreter,
watching the selected video clips together, as an effort to comprehend what some students meant by their non-English
utterances during the lessons. Both interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed for analysis.
Analysis
This section analyzes the phases of introducing new English words to learners with low literacy. I selected this particular
activity for two reasons: rst, the activity of introducing new words transpired for a signicant amount of time, from 20 to
30 min (up to 25% of the entire session), in every class that I attended. This observation is not surprising, considering that
vocabulary is a prerequisite resource for L2 learners to acquire before they can perceive or produce more complicated turns
in the form of phrases or sentences (Dehghani, Motamadi, & Mahbudi, 2011). Second, repair was observed the most often
while the participants were involved in the activity of vocabulary introduction. Researchers have dealt with vocabulary
introduction as one of the primary classroom activities for both beginning L1 (Levy & Lysynchuk, 1997) and L2 readers
(Sagarra & Alba, 2006). Once the learners acquire the ability to treat unfamiliar words by analogy to known words, the
teacher can reduce emphasis on vocabulary during the in-class lesson. For those at beginner levels, however, the teacher
invests a great amount of time in vocabulary and presents each unfamiliar word metalinguistically as a unique form to
apprehend.
Such metalinguistic instruction of L2 vocabulary in my data largely comes in the form of the mechanical question (either
direct or indirect) and answer (QA) sequence, e.g. what is x? (Teacher)(It is) y (Student(s)). Of course, this base pair
transforms and expands in numerous ways, as will be analyzed throughout this section. By maintaining the above uncomplicated structure of classroom talk for teaching vocabulary, the teacher orients to what she believes to be the special
instructional needs of low-literate English language learners. Below is an extract from an interview with the teacher:
Most of them are really illiterate in their own language. So they have very little experience of school. Some of the most
basic concepts of language is- at least I found this with my students- they didnt have the clear idea as one might think
about what a letter was, what a word was, and certainly what a sentence was. You know, one thing I try to be very
careful about when I write on the board, for example, is to put a sufcient space between each word to emphasize
the fact that theyre individual words. I try to emphasize that over and over again . . . That sounds like a very simple
question but it isnt.
The teachers understanding of the learners linguistic history as well as their current status, as above, also results in the
recursive pattern of both repair and classroom activity across the lessons; 48 out of 54 repair episodes occurred within the
identical buildup of the following three phases of vocabulary introduction3 : In Phase 1, new words are preannounced in
print or image. In Phase 2, the structured, even ritualistic, QA exchange aforesaid occurs. The teacher asks the students how
to read a word and the students try to answer, in a response that is usually repairable. In Phase 3, the QA pair expands as
the repair trajectory becomes longer as occasion arises. These phases of the particular classroom activity will be a situational
background against which this article explains the sequential characteristics of the repair practice in the L2 class for lowliterate learners. Since this paper illustrates one such progression during the teaching of new vocabulary across the lessons,
the ve excerpts to be analyzed in this section are from the data collected on the same day.
Phase 1: Preparation and transition
The gist of what happens in the rst phase is that the students are exposed to the printed words or pictures prior to the
teachers explicit guidance on what to do with them. For example, Fig. 1 is a scanned textbook page projected on the front
screen, and Excerpt 1 details the classroom interaction while and after the teacher sets up a laptop and beam projector to
introduce to her students the names of rooms in American houses.
Excerpt 1
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
T:
T:
Ha
T:
T:
Ss:
T:
Ma:
Sa:
(Looking at her laptop monitor and the front screen by turns several times))
Okay um(4.0)
In the process during which technology becomes ready for the lesson, the teachers three Okays (lines 2, 4, 7) marks
the transition of activity. According to Beach (1993), a speakers transitional employment of Okays displays not only an
attention to prior turn but simultaneously state of readiness for movements to next-positioned matters (p. 329). The
teacher in Excerpt 1 gradually establishes Okays along with her nonverbal actions, such as looking at the computer and
the screen by turns or scrolling down the screen, in the transition from one activity to another. Although the teacher does
not verbally clarify any pedagogical focus until line 8, her turn, There it is, signies that the pedagogical focus was already
exposed to the students at that moment. Another evidence for the introduction of a pedagogical focus is Hajis turn Home
(line 5). Thus, the learners are provided a cue to perceive the transition of activity (or the start of a lesson) and what to focus
on pedagogically not only by the teachers verbal production of Okays but also by the visual provision of a target form.
In the following turns in lines 78, the teacher creates a context for the new activity, providing the learners with an overall
picture of what they are going to do. The subject part in her turn what were going to be looking at noties the learners in
advance that its complement will be the pedagogical focus that they need to pay attention to. This notication is reinforced
with her two pauses and a stress on the word home. By additionally combining heres the word with HO:me as a form
more emphasized phonetically than the previous one, home, the teacher introduces the lexical item in focus. Subsequently,
the teacher requests her students to say the word, which is the rst pair part (FPP) of an adjacency pair (Schegloff & Sacks,
1973). Now the context makes the next turn relevant; the students are expected to accept such an instructional request by
reciting the word home immediately after the teachers turn. The students, however, fail to produce the second pair part
(SPP) of the paired sequence. The pause in line 10 displays that they have a problem of hearing or understanding. By repeating
the lexical item (line 11), the teacher diagnoses the previous pause as the students trouble with hearing or understanding.
In this sense, the teachers repetition plays a role of repair initiation. And the students complete the repair, displaying their
understanding of what has been requested by the teachers reciting the targeted word (line 12). The teacher conrms and
evaluates such completion (line 13). As Pomerantz (1984) observes that preferred responses are characteristically performed
without delay, the teachers evaluation latches the previous turn with an ensuing positive marker, yeah.
The episodes of repair that share the sequential feature with Excerpt 1 (i.e. setup transition mark learning new words)
appeared reasonably often during my observation. On all such occasions, the use of visual aids preceded the teachers verbal
introduction to new words. This structure plays two roles. First, as researchers have proved (Hammerly, 1995; Pouwels,
1992), the combination of words and pictorial aids facilitates L2 learning. Second, the visual aids in this researched class
allow the teacher to spare her breath to navigate the teacher-led classroom activities. Put otherwise, visual cues often speak
louder than words, especially for illiterate or low-literate learners. Moore (2007) points out that to ESL beginners with low
literacy the teachers language of the instructions is often more challenging than the language actually needed to perform
the task (p. 7). Note that the teachers relatively lengthy explanation on the upcoming activity in lines 78 in Excerpt 1 does
not work well.
Rather, the trouble in Excerpt 1 is resolved by the teachers structurally even simpler turn, home (line 11). That is, the
students successfully produce the pedagogical focus without the teachers verbose instruction. And this one-word elicitation
of the learners target word production in unison occurs over and over throughout the activity. Hence, the teachers repair
initiation in line 11 in Excerpt 1 not only functions as her effort to resolve the trouble source at hand but lays a foundation
for the linguistic form through which the learners can access repair as a lexical resource throughout the activity. I will come
back to this issue in the discussion of Phase 2.
T:
Ha:
T:
S1:
S2:
T:
Ma:
T:
Ma:
Ha:
T:
Ss:
T:
In the rst line of Excerpt 2, the teacher invites her students to co-complete her turn, by cutting it off after the verb is
and lengthening the vowel sound in the verb. The same is found in line 8. Such a cutting-off and phonetic emphasis guides
the students directly to the pedagogically-focused lexical item. However, Haji and Mayike have trouble to producing the full
target words (lines 2, 9, 10). The data do not tell us whether such failure results from the learners trouble with pronunciation,
or with retrieval of the lexical item or of the knowledge about the lexical item itself. What Hajis and Mayikes turns tell us is
Table 2
The cross-cutting organization of repair in Excerpt 2.
Line
Speaker
IRF
8
9
10
11
12
T
Ma
Ha
T
Ss
Initiation
Response
Feedback
Repetition of feedback (F )
Repair
Trouble
source
Repair
that their construction of the turns with an accompanying upward intonation accomplishes a specic goal. By exhibiting a
contoured guess, Haji and Mayike create the accommodating environment for other correction (Seedhouse, 1997, p. 562).
The social action that Haji and Mayike aim to perform through these try-markers (Sacks & Schegloff, 1979) is understood
as such by the teacher, who immediately provides repairs (lines 3, 11). At this point, the teachers corrections not only display
an orientation to prior turns, but also create a pedagogical environment where the other students can recite the corrected
lexical items, as shown in lines 4, 5, 7 and 12. Intriguingly, lines 8 through 12 above identically repeat the pattern of otherrepair in lines 17. These patterns support Macbeths (2004) argument that classroom correction and the work of repair are
cross-cut in the lesson problems. Table 2 schematizes this cross-cutting organization of repair in lines 8 through 12, adopting
the form of Table 1 in the present paper.
A marked distinction here from Table 1 is that Table 2 does not distinguish repair initiation from repair completion; the
teacher does not withhold repair completion until any student makes an attempt to repair. This decision of the teacher may
be also linked to the students language prociency, but this assumption cannot be veried by the transcript data alone.
What we see for sure is that the teachers turn in Excerpt 2 straightforwardly offers the correction as a feedback following the students try-markers. What is added in this sequence (and in Table 2), instead of the students self-correction in
the fourth turn, is the multiple students (Ss) reproduction of the teacher feedback, or the teachers other-repair. Unlike
in Excerpt 1 where the teacher explicitly gives the students a direction by saying lets all say that, the students in
line 12 in Excerpt 2 are not explicitly required to repeat the lexical item corrected by the teacher in the prior turn.
Notwithstanding, they produce the pedagogical focus without instruction. This phenomenon, the students response in
one accord to the teachers one-word elicitation in the discussion of Excerpt 1, occurred in the gamut of classroom interaction that I observed. Additionally, this trend was member-checked during the follow-up interview with the teacher, who
said:
Obviously Im the one who talks the most in the class, but Im always conscious of the kind of word or expression
I choose to say. Sometimes I just say a word over and over, until they get familiar with it. Its almost impossible to
explain them what the word means in English. They wont get it. So a lot of utterances that I make during the class
consist of one or two words, especially when the word is what I want them to learn.
The teacher talk is tailored to the learners ability not only to comprehend L2 input but also to make L2 output. The L2
knowledge becomes available, through the form of single words, for the students to perceive and recite. This achievement
of linguistic accessibility by the teachers one-word elicitation can be explained in the conversation data as well. In Excerpt
2, the students repetition with one voice is clearly oriented toward the teachers original request for the co-completion
of the targeted word. For instance, the students chorus in line 12 is attributed to the teachers cut-off turn in line 8. The
students in lines 4, 5, and 7 also return to the teachers invitation to co-completion in line 1. This orientation implies a shared
understanding among participants concerning the teachers management of the class as a cohort (Payne & Hustler, 1980).
Experienced teachers, standing in front of dozens of students, establish a relationship with the class as a whole rather than
with each individual separately. Payne and Hustler remark on how the assembled parties in the classroom accomplish this
relationship:
The teacher does not announce that the lesson is beginning, nor does he explicitly describe the pupils as a collectivity;
rather it is through the organization of his talk that these actions are being made available to the parties in the occasion
and to us as hearers/readers/observers of the interaction (Payne & Hustler, 1980, p. 53).
Likewise, the teacher in Excerpt 2 does not announce exactly whom she wants to complete her cut-off turns in lines 1
and 8. The teachers feedback (i.e. the third slot of IRFF in Table 2) is also oriented toward the entire class, in spite of the fact
that, with regard to the practice of repair, she merely corrects one or two students try-marked guesses. And the students,
aware of this mechanism, respond to the teachers incipient request as a cohort with one voice. To display the corresponding
relationship between the rst and the fourth turns in the IRFF quadriad, Table 2 can be updated as below.
In the rst pair part, the teacher heralds a new pedagogical focus by asking the students to guess and orally produce it. After
a trial and error interval, all the students duly reach the second pair part. This paired relationship between the teachers
request/question and the students repetition of the teachers feedback is maintained even when the teacher feedback is
longer than a word, as found in Excerpt 3.
Table 3
The relationship between L2 classroom repair and adjacency pair.
Speaker
IRF
Adjacency pair
T
S
T
Ss
Initiation
Response
Feedback
Repetition of feedback (F )
Repair
Trouble source
Repair
Excerpt 3
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
T:
Ha:
T:
Ha:
Hu:
Sa:
Ma:
Uh-hmm, (1.0) ((Moving the mouse pointer from one picture to another on the
screen)) what do you think this is.
(3.0)
House?
Its also a- (.) a house in the sense that people live. But this is an aPA:rtment
building.
Apart[ment building.
[Apartment building.
[Apartment.=
=Building.
After a three-second pause, Haji tries to answer the teachers question. Unlike what we have seen in Excerpts 1 and 2, here
the ensuing feedback consists of more than one word (lines 56). Nonetheless, the students selectively recognize what the
pedagogical focus is there and produce it from lines 7 through 10, as the SPP toward the FPP, the teachers original question
in line 2. To apply this string to Table 3, Excerpt 3 proceeds as Initiation (line 2) Response (line 4) Feedback (lines 56)
Repetition of Feedback (lines 710).
Of interest in this teacher feedback is the moment-by-moment course of teacher-repair. Above all, the teachers initiation
of repair in line 5 concurs with Seedhouses (1997) assessment of a teachers tendency to avoid overt negative evaluations
on students linguistic errors. The teacher rst partially agrees that Hajis attempt is not wrong in a sense. However, the
following conjunction But is a cue which indicates that his answer of house is not what the teacher expects to hear. Prior
to this, the students are likely to perceive that Hajis turn in line 4 has a problem already from the moment when the teacher
utters the word also in line 5. Beyond demonstrably denoting the existence of trouble, the teachers use of the word also
projects the upcoming conjunction But.
Hutchby and Wooftt (2008) claim that the projectability in turn-construction units enables the participants to foresee
what sort of unit it is and at what point it is likely to end (p. 50). The data can only collect spoken data and not how those
turns are understood by the interlocutors. Peering into the structure of the teacher feedback in Excerpt 3, however, we can
infer that the students are already aware that the teachers entire turn in lines 56 will be a long explanation, even before
her turn comes to an end. On hearing her word also, the students take a collaborative action to refrain from interrupting
her in mid-utterance, waiting for a decisive clue of other-repair in her turn. At last, the teacher provides a correction: she
constructs the word apartment with an emphatic stress and a lengthened vowel. The students display their understanding
of the teacher correction and pedagogical focus at the moment by reciting the lexical item in partially overlapped (lines 79)
and co-completed ways (lines 910).
Formulating her repair initiation in this circumlocutory way, the teacher achieves the effect of softening her disagreement
with the students try-marked answer. Although mitigated, structural features of the design of the teachers turn are a
demonstrable cue for the students to draw a conventionalized inference about the kind of action the turn is performing. As
noted earlier, such structural features have been investigated in CA as the notion of (dis)preference (Pomerantz & Heritage,
2013; Sacks, 1987). In case of Excerpt 3, also and but are dispreference markers which are characteristic of the teachercorrection turn. Furthermore, the participants in the classroom display their knowledge of what kind of specic actions gets
accomplished by this institutionalized way of speaking.
To summarize Phase 2, the teacher either directly asks a question or indirectly cuts her turn off to let her students focus on
a new L2 word. Sharing a local understanding that this question is asked to many and unspecied participants, the students
produce candidate answers. The teacher repairs them, which is followed by the students repetition of what is repaired in
unison. The pattern of QA sequence found in Phase 2 demonstrates that the participants are aware of the tacit rules in this
particular setting such as the teachers cohorting strategy and, as a consequence, a solid structure of the participant roles of
teacher and student.
Table 4
The expanded sequence of L2 classroom repair in Excerpt 4.
Line
Speaker
IRF
Adjacency pair
2
34
5
67
8, 1011
9, 1213
14
15
T
S
T
S
T
S
T
Ss
Initiation
Response
Feedback
Another form of response (R2)
Another form of feedback (F2)
The other form of response (R3)
The other form of feedback (F3)
Repetition of feedback (F )
Repair
Trouble source
Repair
Trouble source
Repair
Trouble source
Repair
Excerpt 4
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
T:
Ma:
Ha:
T:
Ma:
Ha:
T:
Ha:
T:
Ha:
T:
Ss:
((Moving the mouse pointer from one picture to another on the screen)) And then
PA:io::- Number se- nine is paio::.
Pa-=
=Pa::- ti((Enlarging the picture of patio on the screen using the mouse)) Paio:: Paio::.
Patiso.
((Looking at Mayike)) Eh?
((Looking at Haji)) Pa:io. Thats outside too::, but on the rst oor.
Patiso.
[Patis((Looking around the other students)) [First oor. Whereas ba:lco[ny on second
oor, third oor, fourth oor.=
[Patiso, Patos.
=Patos.
((Looking at Haji)) PA::io.s
Paio.
In the segment above, the teacher neither provides a straightforward direction to say the target word aloud (e.g. Excerpt
1), nor cuts her turn off strategically to elicit co-completion (e.g. Excerpt 2), nor asks a direct question about the target
word (e.g. Excerpt 3). Instead, she produces a declarative, which results in responses from two students only (lines 34). The
absence of responses from ve other students can reect two possibilities. First, the teachers declarative sentence might not
be received explicitly as a request for repetition of the target word, patio. Or, when we consider that the two students turns
are incomplete in lines 34, the others might have been hesitant to produce the target word owing to a lack of condence
in how to pronounce it. Note that the teacher aps/t/(line 2), while Haji does not (line 4). Unlike the teachers cut-off, the L2
students cut-off signals their concern with the coming talk (Iles, 1996, p. 37). Whichever is the case, the teacher repairs
the students problem of hearing, understanding, or pronouncing by producing the target word twice more (line 5).
The teachers over-accented and stretched utterance in line 5, however, is not followed by the students production of
the target word in chorus. What follows is Mayikes new error, patiso, a nonsense word with an accent on the second
syllable and with a fricative/s/inserted between the second and the third syllables of the target word.4 As this turn was softly
produced, it is likely that Haji, who sat next to Mayike, heard it but the teacher did not. Haji turns his head toward Mayike,
producing Eh? And the teachers eye gaze in line 8 demonstrates that she perceives Hajis turn in line 7 as an other-repair
initiator (for discussion of other-repair initiator techniques, see Schegloff et al., 1977).
The teachers second repair in line 8 is twofold: a repetition of the target word as per usual, plus an explanation of the
meaning of the word (line 8). When Haji keeps mispronouncing the word (line 9), the teachers semantic approach to the
target form is built up in lines 1011. Hajis nagging trouble causes the third round of a repair sequence; this time the teacher
returns to phonology, but as an even louder and more lengthened form. Two overlaps and a latch found in lines 913 intimate
that Haji does not listen to what the teacher says with care; it is even possible that he makes errors on purpose, playing on
words by rearranging the phonemes and the place of accent. This possibility is supported by the fact that all the students,
including Haji, produce the target form with no difculty at last (line 15). Again, the teacher repair in line 14 simply consists
of a word, which seems more audible and more distinctive to the students than her prior explanation.
Besides, it is worth noticing that the teachers eye gaze species the speaker of trouble source in line 14 (for discussion of
the effect of eye gaze in educational settings, see Lund, 2007). To track the course of her gaze move in this episode, the teacher
maintains the cohorting at base (lines 1, 5, 10), as examined in the analysis of Excerpt 2; such treatment, however, deviates
from its usual route at odd times (lines 8, 14). That is, the recipient of the teacher turn switches between the entire class and
an individual student in Excerpt 4. Such back-and-forth orientation of the teacher turn reects the teachers real-time, dual
role of leading a whole group of students and of coaching individuals whose language prociency, background, and interest
might vary.
In view of the typical IRFF sequence discussed in Phase 2 through Tables 2 and 3, Mayikes turn in line 6 in Excerpt 4 is
a reply to the teacher repair in line 5 and at the same time a trouble source which triggers another teacher repair in line 8.
Table 4 summarizes this cross-cut and expanded structure of L2 classroom repair presented in Excerpt 4.
Note that in line 15 all the students orient toward the teachers elicitation of repetition in the very rst turn of the excerpt,
despite the intervention of multiple troubles and repairs. It would not sound awkward even if the last line immediately
10
followed the rst line of Excerpt 4 without the sequence of repair in between. This structural connection is related to the fact
that the participants share a common understanding of how the activity of vocabulary introduction and practice proceeds
in this local setting. This context-dependent knowledge strengthens the association between the teachers rst part and the
students second part of the classroom adjacency pair, no matter how distant they are from each other by the embedded
trouble-repair pairs of R(n)-F(n).
The multiply expanded sequence of repair in Excerpt 4 reveals that the teacher does not easily let go of her students
trouble. It is hard to imagine such a repairer in everyday conversation outside the classroom, who persists in correcting
errors until she reaches the second or third round of the sequence. What we normally do is to let the conversation move on
without further repair once it fails, saying, for instance, Ferget it (Schegloff et al., 1977, p. 365). In contrast, the analysis of
Excerpt 4 elucidates how the participants tweak and complicate the general preference toward repair in communication, in
order to achieve the institutional aim and preserve the identity of teacher and learner in the L2 classroom context.
A question that arises here is at what moment, if ever, the teacher may give up her task of repair and just let it go.
Indeed, the teacher will be bound to stop at some point in the face of further learner errors. What is the structural condition
that often makes the teacher nally choose a laissez-faire attitude toward the endless learner trouble? Excerpt 5, another
extract concerning the expanded L2 classroom repair in Phase 3, lays out an example of this condition.
Excerpt 5
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Ss:
T:
Ab:
T:
Ab:
Ss:
T:
Ab:
T:
Mi:
T:
Ab:
T:
Sa:
T:
Sa:
T:
Living room.
(1.0)
((Opening the textbook on the table)) Oka:y, (.) now. (2.0) Lets look at um- the
six((Looking at the teacher)) Teacher.
((Turning her eyes from the book to Abdi)) Yes.
Its- uh- like- um- ee- li- limingLi[ving room
[Living room.=
=Living- (.) RO::m.
LIving- (.) ROOm.
Living (.) room.
Two group two words. Living (.) room. Uh-hmmm, (0.5) yes.
Living, (.) RO:m.
Living room. Its- (2.0) the room [where you have a sofa::, and a cha:ir, and
[<Living->
maybe a tivi::, (0.5) [and you sit the:re and watch tivi maybe?
[El, ai, vi, ai, en, ji. ((Looking at the handout))
(2.0)
Living room. <O:Ka:y.> (.) ((Pointing at a textbook page with her index nger))
Lets look at the six pictures on the bottom of this pa:ge. Number one is the:::
In the instance above, the teacher is about to proceed to the next activity. After the students reading-aloud of the last
pedagogical focus in the previous activity (line 1), a brief pause and the activity-transition marker Okay follow. The word
now is another transition marker, which justies the ensuing two-second pause for the participants getting ready for the
next activity. The teachers turn lets look at um- the six- embarks the students on the new phase of the lesson. Such a
role for this turn is afrmed later in line 21, where the teachers cut-off turn in line 4 is recovered after the inserted repair
episode (lines 520). Abdis summon interrupts the teachers ongoing turn (line 5), and the teacher reacts to it, saying yes.
What is interesting in the following turns is that everyone in the class notices that Abdis stammering utterance with many
cut-offs in line 7 is a form of question, or FPP which requests SPP, or a trouble source to be repaired. Multiple students and
the teacher correct it almost simultaneously (note an overlap between lines 8 and 9).
Abdis reproduction of the repaired (line 10) is more audible and complete than his rst trial (line 7). It causes, however,
another round of repair trajectory. That is, Abdis turn in line 7 is detected as a trouble source, which is repaired by others in
lines 11 through 13. The linguistic focus of the teacher correction changes from phonology (line 11) to morphology (line 13).
Abdis continuous mispronunciation (line 14) invites another teacher-correction, which changes its approach once again to
touching the target words semantic level (lines 15, 17). The linguistic forms of three trouble sources vary little and provide
few clues about what the exact trouble that Abdi addresses is. The teachers way of correction, per contra, evolves in accord
with different linguistic aspects. Of course, Abdis placing a short pause between living and RO:m in line 10 provides
the teacher with a cue that Abdi might be asking whether it is two separate words or not. This is why the teacher stops
emphasizing the words pronunciation and explains its morphological shape (line 13). Therefore, the teachers LIving (.)
ROOm in line 11 and living (.) room in line 13 instruct entirely different linguistic aspects, although they sound the same
on the surface.
The teacher waits for Abdis signal that his problem has ever been resolved (line 13). Her gaze at Abdi implies it, in addition
to a considerable amount of time for Abdi to produce any reaction while the teacher constructs her turn with conrmation
markers (Uh-hmmm and yes) and a pause. What appears in the next turn is, however, a problematic form as it is exactly
same as the one Abdi produced before the teacher-correction. To top it off, unlike the previous trouble source in line 10, the
new one in line 14 contains even less information about what Abdi might like to say. Nevertheless, the teacher once again
moves on to a different linguistic aspect (semantics) of the target word (lines 15, 17). After this repair, the teacher again
11
waits for Abdis reaction, allowing a two-second pause and producing living room for the last time. No reaction from Abdi;
the teacher nally marks a topic transition by establishing Okay with an emphatic stress and an unhurried tempo. It is
followed by her instruction to look at the pictures, i.e. a recovered activity to which the participants return after the abruptly
inserted repair episode from line 5 to line 20.
What Excerpt 5 tells us about why the teacher stops repairing at a particular moment is the silence. Cross-culturally
studied (e.g. Harumi, 2011; Tatar, 2005), the classroom silence is either a good or bad sign that the teacher receives from
the students as a cohort and interprets to make decisions. In case of Excerpt 5, the teachers interpretation of the silence is
arbitrary because of the language barrier. The episode might have been much longer with more pairs of trouble source-repair,
if Abdi spoke English better or the teacher spoke Oromo.
12
of the teachers treating them as a cohort in general, for instance, in Excerpt 5 where Minani and Saa constantly interrupt
while Abdis problem is repaired. Here the students do not exhibit yet, on the other hand, their understanding of what
the silence means in this particular moment after the teacher repair. Overall, the students in my data are in the process
of acquainting themselves with the mechanism of L2 classroom repair and how it is utilized as resource for language
learning.
Likewise, the observed class non-authentic L2 talk and its structure are complicated enough to take time to be accustomed.
In order to participate in the activity of vocabulary introduction, for example, the learners have to understand its different
phases what the picture on the front screen is for, what the teacher expects by her turns home in line 11 of Excerpt
1 or number three is- in line 1 of Excerpt 2, and so forth. The practice of teacher repair in this setting is therefore a
sophisticated and multifaceted task that encompasses both communicative and metacommunicative processes of language
learning.
The last point that merits attention in the present analysis is the teachers decision-making in the repair trajectory.
The teacher constantly adjusts to whom her turns are oriented between the whole class and individual speakers of the
trouble source. She tailors different linguistic approaches to confront misunderstandings, and at some point arbitrarily
wraps it up. Relating these ndings to the observed language barrier among the participants and a consequential dearth of
student feedback, this paper may join the discussion of the teachers recipient design based on the students L2 performance
(Garnkel, 1967). The muter the students are, the more agile the teacher is obliged to be; she may have to ll in more
pigeonholes of interaction in the class for low-literate students than in other L2 classes, lest they be left awkwardly silent.
Even though keeping her utterances concise and structurally simple in general, the teachers communicative behavior (i.e.
shifting eye gaze, linguistically diversied explanation of vocabulary, a laissez-faire attitude toward failed repair) is adapted
to the particular addressees, the low-literate ESL learners.
To sum up, this article complicates the practice of repair as understood in the literature on the L2 classroom discourse by
specically focusing on the subset of adult ESL learners who have a background of low literacy. Since this study is descriptive
and micro-analytic with a data set from a single classroom, the ndings cannot yet be generalized. Future research is needed
with a larger amount of data from multiple classroom contexts to extend our knowledge of repair as a linguistic resource for
low-literate learners. That said, this paper can be an initial step to inquire whether our understandings of the L2 classroom
repair can be extended to all learners. Pedagogically, it is hoped that the present analysis contributes to informing the
teachers who will teach low-literate immigrant adult L2 learners for the rst time about how to adapt their repair strategies
to the learners literacy and linguistic status.
Notes
1. Correction, the replacement of an error by what is correct (Schegloff et al., 1977, p. 363), is a subtype of repair, in terms
of its orientation to the problem of common understanding.
2. In the observed class, the vocabulary activity is twofold: introduction and review of vocabulary. This paper examines the
former only.
3. For discussion of repair along with the chronological phases of an action, see Egbert (1998).
4. I consider patiso as a nonsense word based on the member-check with an Oromo-English interpreter who conrmed
that it was not an Oromo word.
Name
First language
Ab
Ha
Hu
Ma
Mi
Sa
Te
S/S1/S2. . .
Ss
T
Abdi
Haji
Hussein
Mayike
Minani
Saa
Terefe (not appear in this paper)
A student unidentied
All seven students
Teacher
Oromo
Oromo
Oromo
Somali
Kirundi
Oromo
Oromo
13
Meaning
[
=
(0.0)
(.)
:::
word
WORD
?/./,
Overlapping utterances
Latched utterances
Length of silence by tenths of seconds
Micro-pause
Prolonged sound
Shift into especially high pitch
Relatively high volume
Especially high volume
Rising/falling/continuing intonation
Soft sound
Cut-off
Speedy utterances
Slow utterances
Transcribers description
><
<>
(())
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