On Teacher-initiated Repair

Along with the rapid development of postgraduate education, the English teaching for non-English major has aroused the interest of numerous scholars and teachers. It will be beneficial if the scholars conduct a thorough investigation into English teaching for non-English major postgraduate students. Repair, as a common phenomenon in daily conversation, finds its way to classes of oral English teaching for non-English major postgraduate students. However, it is a pity that the amount of research in this field has been far from adequate. Therefore, this dissertation, by using both quantitative and qualitative methods, takes a conversation-analysis approach to teacher-initiated repair of 1431 instances from the data collected by the author and her coworkers from the university where they are currently teaching.The study differentiates Chinese versions of"repair"before categorizing relevant findings made by scholars both at home and abroad by means of literature review. Not only does it point out but justifies that Chinese term"修正"is, among the others, the most precise one. In our study, the teacher-initiated repair in English teaching for non-English major postgraduate students has been defined and classified for the first time so as to lay a solid foundation for the further research in this field. Based on a thorough investigation of the data, a detailed survey of functions, structural preference, raparandum, initiation techniques and positions and repair strategies has been carried out respectively.The main body of the dissertation, composed of Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, focuses itself on the three components of repair, that is, raparandum, initiation and strategies. Chapter 4 has found out that the preference account of teacher-initiated repair in teacher-student conversations accords basically with that proposed by SJS(1977). In the light of the trouble sources and the linguistic levels at which repairs occur, the instances in the data are formally classified into phonetic, lexical, syntactic and discoursal repairs. A careful investigation has revealed that lexical raparandum outnumbers other three types of raparandum. On the other hand, the techniques and the placements of initiation shape much of the working of the organization of repair when it comes to a systematic study of initiation. Seven initiation techniques are studied according to the frequencies of their occurrences: pause, sound stretch or non-lexical filler; question; without explicit initiator; compounding initiators; repetition + rising intonation; repetition request; initiation marker. As for the initiation placement, the same turn self-initiation, the same turn transition place self-initiation and other initiation in the next turn are probed into and elaborated. After that a scale of repair strategies in teacher-initiated repair has been proposed and elaborated in terms of their frequencies of the occurrences, that is completion, reformulation, explanation, codeswitching, rejection, spelling(E)/word-splitting(C), repetition and recast.In addition, an insightful study is carried out to explore the effect produced by teacher-student conversation, one of institutional conversations, on the mechanism of teacher-initiated repair. It is further found out that teacher-initiated repair has not only modulated initiation techniques by teacher violating three maxims of CP but varied preferences of initiation structure at different classroom activities. It is also proved in our study that comprehensible input and comprehensive output of target language can be facilitated by teacher-initiated repair. To sum up, teacher-initiated repair is a means utilized by teacher to achieve teaching objectives in oral English classroom, which will hope much room for the study of repair in language classroom.