Pedagogical Functions of Teachers' Conversational Repair Strategies in the ESL Classroom

The present study examines various pedagogical functions of conversational repair strategies employed by the teacher in the ESL classroom. As part of interactional resources, conversational repair is defined as the treatment of trouble occurring in interactive language use and is originally designed to deal with communication problems. Research on conversational repair has focused on ordinary conversation and organization of repair practices. Studies on more pedagogical functions of repair sequences initiated by the teacher are very few. The data were from five hours of ESL structure classes in an intensive English institute at a large U.S. university. They were closely transcribed and microanalyzed following the conversation-analytic methodology. The analysis found that ESL teachers' repair techniques not only resolve communication problems but they are also designed to serve several important instructional purposes of teaching the target language. They include creating opportunities of comprehensible input, inducing modified comprehensible output from students, guiding and controlling student output, and initiating corrections by initiating repair.