Repair in Foreign Language Teaching

Repair, defined in this paper as modifications of trouble sources which have manifested themselves in the discourse, is an important activity in FL learning and communication, both in educational and non-educational contexts. It is argued that studies of repair in the FL classroom should include all repair activity rather than focus on one specific repair type, viz., the teacher's correction of learners' errors. In this study the four repair types suggested by Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks (1977) are analyzed, and a further distinction is made according to whether the trouble source is produced by the teacher or a learner. It is shown that different preferences for repair patterns vary with the type of classroom activity (language-centered vs. content-centered activities), and it is discussed how these preferences relate to repair in non-educational learner-native speaker discourse.