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Issues in Applied Linguistics

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The Organization of Second Language Classroom Repair

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the repair mechanism in second language classroom talk. More specifically, the current paper focuses on how co-participants (i.e., the teacher and the learners) carry out repair operations on the trouble source produced by the learner in the second language instructed talk-in-interaction. The present findings show that participation frameworks (i.e., types of activities) play an important role in constructing repair sequences in the instructional context. When learners engage in role-playing activities with one another, a wide variety of repair sequences are manifested, such as self-initiated and self-completed, self-initiated and other-completed, and other-initiated and other- completed repair sequences.The collaborative nature of repair sequences is also manifested in learner role-playing activities, in which self-initiation of the trouble source by the learner is collaboratively completed withco-participants in the form of word search and try-marking. Other-initiated and other-completed repair in learner role-playing activities is manifested in the form of cluing, which is accompanied by the sequence of teacher's initiation, learner's response, and teacher's evaluation (i.e., IRE sequence). Teacher-fronted activities, on the other hand, in which a teacher asks a question to learner(s), are mainly characterized by other-initiated and other-completed repair structures in the form of IRE sequence and unmodulated"no." Furthermore, a close examination of learners' responses to the teacher's repair (e.g., recast) reveals the key role of activity types operating in L2 instructional discourse.

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