A Study Of Teacher-Initiated Conversational Repair In EFL Classrooms For Undergraduate English Majors

Many scholars have conducted a lot of research and gained abundant results on conversational repair since 1970 s.Conversational repair refers to eliminating errors and troubles that occur in speaking,listening and understanding.It is a common phenomenon in interpersonal activities,which can be beneficial to interactive communications.Therefore,in classroom settings,teachers often use conversational repair to help with student's language input and output.However,after reviewing a lot of relevant literature,I realize that although there is a lot of research on conversational repair from different perspectives,the research on teacher-initiated conversational repair in English classrooms is so far limited in China.Because most of the classroom repair research focuses on self-repair and student-initiated repair with less research on teacher-initiated repair.Therefore,this paper will adopt the method of conversation analysis(Hereafter CA),documentary method and so on,with the purpose of analyzing the categories,strategies and functions of conversational repair initiated by teachers in EFL classrooms for undergraduate English majors.The significance of this study is to enrich the results of teacher-initiated repair,and to provide reference for repair studies of other institutional conversations,and to enable educational researchers and teachers to understand the specific conversational repair in the classroom context and improve their teaching.Based on the data transcribed from the videos of national best courses,CECL(Communicative English for Chinese Learners)courses of G University,this study conducted a detailed investigation on teacher-initiated repair in English-majored undergraduate English as a Foreign Language(Hereafter EFL)classrooms.The research results are as follows:1.There are two kinds of teacher-initiated repair in English-majored undergraduate EFL classrooms: teacher-initiated teacher-repair with sub-categories of teacher self-initiated teacher self-repair(Hereafter TSTS),teacher other-initiated teacher other-repair(Hereafter TOTO),and teacher-initiated student-repair with sub-categories of teacher self-initiated student other-repair(Hereafter TSSO),teacher other-initiated student self-repair(Hereafter TOSS),teacher other-initiated student other-repair(Hereafter TOSO).2.There are six strategies of teacher-initiated repair in English-majored undergraduate EFL classrooms: completion,explanation,repetition,direct repair,reconstruction,and non-verbal strategies.3.There are three kinds of functions of teacher-initiated repair in collected corpus of English-majored undergraduate EFL classrooms: providing the accurate target language input to students,creating opportunity for students' target language output,and checking the teaching effect.Teacher-initiated repair has important pedagogical implications.Firstly,teachers can integrate conversational repair mechanism with teaching practice to solve practical problems in class.Furthermore,it can help with students' target language input and output,so as to promote students' communicative competence.