The Repair Practices of Secondary English Teachers: A Classroom Discourse Analysis

This qualitative descriptive study described and analyzed the self-repair practices of the Secondary English Teachers in terms of repair initiations, opportunity space, repair operations, instances of repair and its perceived impacts in their videotaped ESL classes through the Conversation Analysis (CA) research methodology. The study was conducted in two analogous research settings where the four research participants were selected through consecutive sampling. There were cumulatively 279 recorded repair procedures in the 600-minute videotaped classes. The observation data were transcribed manually using the ELAN annotation tool software while the perceived impacts were determined through journal analysis and semi-structured interview. The obtained qualitative data underwent internal and external validation through Participant Checking and Inter-coding, respectively.

The findings revealed that pre-positioned repair initiation is more prevalent than post-positioned repair initiation. "Word Search" and "Cut-off" are the most common pre- and post-initiation practices. The participants dominantly instigated repair in the T1 opportunity space. Meanwhile, "Searching" was identified as the most used repair operation followed by Recycling and Reformatting. The participants prevalently employed repair practice to maintain intersubjectivity, prevent misunderstanding and correct errors in their ESL classes. The repair instances were perceived to have positive impacts in the second language teaching and second language learning.