• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.13 no.2
• /
• pp.177-200
• /
• 2007

The language socialization approach states that novices are socialized into cultural norms through participating in routine, repeated interactional acts and sequences (e.g., Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984; Ochs, 1988; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986a; 1986b; Watson-Gegeo & Gegeo, 1986). One of the cultural norms or dominant epistemological orientations in American culture is the tendency to avoid the overt display of power asymmetry in novice-expert relationship (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984). This study examines how this cultural preference is reflected and encoded in ESL teachers' use of routine discourse patterns in corrective sequences. Eight hours of ESL classes taught by three Caucasian teachers born and educated in the U.S. were analyzed for the study. The analysis showed that the cultural tendency in question is keyed and indexed in the teacher's routine corrective discourse patterns in the form of various questioning, elicitation, and mitigation practices. Findings support that teachers' routine classroom discourse practices represent their cultural ideologies and transfer these cultural predispositions to second language learners and that they possibly socialize the learners into the target language-oriented beliefs.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.11 no.4
• /
• pp.121-137
• /
• 2005

The present study aims to examine how the roles of teacher and learners affect the repair patterns of both teacher's and learner's utterances in English as a second language (ESL) classroom discourse. The study analyzed beginning ESL classroom discourse and found that the structure of repair seems to be greatly influenced by the roles of participants in a second language classroom. The teacher's repair work was mainly characterized by self-repair. In contrast, learners' repair sequences were predominantly characterized by other-repair. More specifically, self-initiation by the learner of the trouble source was cooperatively completed by the teacher and the other learners. Other-initiated and other-completed repair was the most prevalent form in the current classroom data, which was carried out by the teacher in both modulated and unmodulated manners. When the trouble sources were mostly concerned with the learners' problems with linguistic competence and information presented in the textbook, other-repair took place in a modulated manner (i.e., recasting and prompting). On the other hand, when dealing with learners' errors with factual knowledge, other-repair was conducted in an unmodulated way (i.e., 'no' plus correction).

• English Language & Literature Teaching
• /
• v.12 no.1
• /
• pp.77-101
• /
• 2006

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.