A Study Of Conversational Repair In Junior Middle School English Classroom

Conversational repair is a common phenomenon in human language communication.With the development of foreign language teaching theories, the role of repair in foreignlanguage classroom has aroused the interest of several scholars. While there is littleattention paid to the empirical study of conversational repair in normal teachingenvironment, especially in junior middle school English classroom. In view of this, thispaper tries to study the conversational repair in junior middle school with the method ofconversational analysis, combined with qualitative and quantitative method.The purpose of this research is to explore repair patterns, repair features and repairorganizations in junior middle school English classroom. The data are collected throughaudio-taping of8English lessons of four junior middle school teachers in HuanggangCityand the sources of data last6hours. A total of212repair cases are collected for ourresearch.The significant findings of the present study are as follows:1) There are onlyself-initiation self-repairs as to teachers’ repairs, which is different from Schegloff et al.’sfindings.2) As for students’ repairs, there are four types, namely self-initiation self-repair,self-initiation other-repair, other-initiation self-repair and other-initiation other-repair.Among the four types of students’ repairs, self-initiation self-repairs extremely outnumberthe other three types of repairs, which is extremely different from Schegloff et, al.’sfindings that self-initiation self-repair extremely outnumbers other types of repairs.3)Compared with daily conversational repair, there is one more uptake step in junior middleschool English classroom conversational repair.According to Krashen’s monitor hypothesis, the reason that there is onlyself-initiation self-repair in teachers’ repairs and other-initiation other-repairs substantiallyextremely outnumber other types of repairs is that junior middle school English teachers’English proficiency is far better than that of students’. Hence, teachers are capable ofmonitoring their own language and other students’ language effectively and conductingnecessary appropriateness repair. While students’ English level is relatively weak and they fail to monitor and repair their own language as well as teachers’ in most cases. There isone more uptake step in junior middle school English classroom conversational repair,which is determined by the nature and the purpose of foreign language teaching. Theultimate goal of foreign language teaching is to enable students to use the languagecorrectly. As for students’ mistakes, teachers conduct repair and get students to repeat thecorrect language form, which is closely related to the teaching objectives.