Conversational Repair as a Role‐Defining Mechanism in Classroom Interaction

This article is concerned with the ways in which the students and the teacher in a content-based German as a foreign language class used repair in order to negotiate meaning and form in their classroom. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches, we discuss how repair in this institutional setting differed from repair in mundane conversation and how repair was used differently by the students and the teacher. Given that students and the teacher were all competent speakers of both the first language (L1) and the second language (L2), we found that these differences were not merely indications of incomplete L2 usage. Instead, they manifested how the students and the teacher enacted and perceived their respective roles within the classroom and, based on role concepts, demonstrated different access to repair as a resource. The analysis shows that repair is a resource for modified output as well as modified input in classroom settings.

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