A conversation-analytic study of repair practices in one-on-one ESL tutoring.

摘要

Using a conversation analytic methodology, this study focuses on interactional practices called "repair," which address a wide range of problems in speaking, hearing, and understanding talk-in-interaction. More specifically, it examines how tutors and tutees use repair practices to deal with the tutees' linguistic troubles or errors in one-on-one ESL tutoring sessions. It investigates how these repair practices are used in a way that manifests the participants' orientation for L2 teaching and learning and how they are different from those in other L2 interactional settings. It also explores how the repair practices are coordinated with gesture.;The investigation of the instances of repair in my data set shows that the tutees often initiate repair on their own talk by engaging in searches for syntactic features as well as searches for words and phrases and solicit their tutors' assistance by using various interactional resources. In these instances, the tutees invoke the tutors' linguistic expertise as relevant in resolving their troubles, and the tutors respond in a way that displays their pedagogical orientations. In the cases of tutors' repair initiation on their tutees' linguistic troubles or problems, they initiate repair both for communicative reasons and for pedagogical purposes. In each case, the tutors' repair (initiation) often results in unique interactional trajectories, such as the participants' revisit to the trouble source after the completion of the current sequence or an occurrence of another repair sequence due to the tutees' misunderstanding of the tutors' repair initiation. Also, the tutors are found to respond differently to the tutees' linguistics errors when they are produced in the first pair part of an adjacency pair, which requires certain types of responsive actions.;In terms of coordination between repair and gesture, gestures are often used in the tutees' word searches in their efforts to fill in the lexical gaps and to elicit the sought-for-items from the tutors. During the word searches, the tutees sometimes produce verbal solutions that do not match their concurrent gestures, and it engenders the tutors' corrective feedback. In addition, gestures are used as repair initiators, signaling problems in understanding or hearing the prior talk, and these gestures result in the original speakers' linguistic modifications of their prior utterances. Finally, gestures are found to be salient interactional resources in repair completion. When their recipients initiate repair on their prior utterances, the tutors and the tutees sometimes add gestures or revise their prior gestures, while repeating the same utterances.;Overall, repair sequences in ESL tutoring provide important clues in understanding the distinctive organization of ESL tutoring as a specific speech event. They constitute critical sequential environments in which the institutional goals of the speech event (i.e., L2 teaching and learning) become more demonstrably oriented to and more actively pursued by the participants.