The Organization of Repair in SSLD Classroom Discourse: How to Expose the Trouble-Source

As children with specific speech and language difficulties (SSLD) have problems processing language, they are vulnerable in the classroom since it is primarily an oral environment. Repairs offer a potentially useful source of information for the language learner but, to benefit from feedback about their errors or misunderstandings, children must notice the corrective potential in the stream of educational discourse. Repair practices (245) with children with SSLD were analysed quantitatively in terms of age and type of activity. They were also analysed sequentially, using conversation analysis. Repairs dealing with form (grammatical and phonological) were not immediately taken up by the children whereas those concerning meaning (lexical and content) mostly led to self-correction. One explanation is that, during form repair, the adults’ corrective moves are embedded in turns that perform multiple work, so that children attend primarily to meaning. Designs that may be better suited to exposing corrections are discussed, with particular reference to features of prosody.

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