A Case Study Of Repair Initiated By Teachers In Oral English Class

Repair refers to the process in which the speaker unintentionally misuse the language or correct the misunderstanding, which includes self-correction and other modified forms. In order to remove the obstacles, maintain, protect the conversation session, more and more linguists and second language acquisition researchers begin to focus on the research of this field. Chinese and foreign scholars have recently also had this interest in this, which makes the relevant researches to go deeper and involved more widely.Sociolinguists Schegloff (1977) classified the structure of the repair model, he believes the structure of this model consists of three parts:the trouble source, initiation and repair outcome.The present study, which involved one Australian teacher and one Chinese teacher, on the basis of repair types and repair-initiation strategies of Schegloff et al's work and tried to explore repair phenomena of classroom conversations.The research questions are:1. What types of repair are used respectively in Chinese teacher's oral English class and Foreign teacher's oral English class? How is the repair sequence initiated by the teachers in the two classroom discourses distributed?2. How do the teachers initiate repair in response to the students'different errors?How does the initiation influence the students'modified comprehensible output in the two classroom discourses?The database is drawn from the transcripts of 6 lessons'recording by a Chinese and foreign teacher with each giving 3 lessons, totaling 4 hours. The major findings are as follows:1) 9 types of repair were found in both of the teachers'classes, and other-initiated peer-repair (teacher-initiated other-student repair), which is not found in everyday conversation, was found in classroom conversation, particularly in the teacher-student interaction.2) Other-initiated self-repair (teacher-initiated other-student repair) was the most frequently used type in both teachers'classes.3) We could easily find the output rate of the students in Chinese teacher's class was higher than that in foreign teacher's class.4) Repairs serve as a pedagogical tool and are useful resources to modify output and make input more comprehensible in institutional settings, which makes both the teachers and students talk and study more effectively. There is relationship between pedagogy and interaction.The study has some limitations, so I hope future study can give more comparative analysis of classes and play a role in attracting valuable opinions, to contribute to a future study and to make longitude studies to support the research result that long-term impact of modified output is helpful to the learners'L2 acquisition.