Repair practices in L2 Korean peer interaction: other-initiation and recipient participation in self-initiated repair

Repair is central to maintaining intersubjectivity and conversational progressivity, and its relevance for language education is well established. Grounded in an interactional competence framework, this conversation-analytic study examines repair practices in L2 Korean peer interaction, focusing on other-initiation of repair and recipient participation in self-initiated repair sequences. Findings indicate that recipients frequently use partial repetition and candidate understandings to initiate repair, primarily targeting lexical and grammatical trouble sources in ways that diverge from native-speaker tendencies in Korean. Repair also emerges collaboratively in self-initiated sequences, particularly word searches, where recipients provide scaffolded assistance through collaborative completion and candidate forms: participants’ uptake of these repaired forms suggests that such sequences create locally occasioned opportunities for learning. These findings expand comparative accounts of repair by showing how repair practices are shaped by the specific linguistic demands of Korean.