“Use Your Words”: Other-Initiated Repair and Non-Minimal Responses in an Auditory-Verbal Classroom

• In Event: 2134 - The Nature and Import of Participation in Social Interaction

Abstract

This paper uses Conversation Analysis to explore why instances of other-initiated repair of speakers’ utterances occur –and what kind of trouble is targeted– when there does not appear to be problems in hearing, understanding, or speaking (i.e., grammatical errors). Specifically, I focus on teacher-initiated repair practices on students’ utterances in an Auditory-Verbal preschool classroom for Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing but oral children. Analysis reveals a particular repair trajectory that consistently emerged in conversational sequences launched by questions without known answers, an adaptation of the traditional Initiation-Reply-Evaluation/Feedback (IRE/IRF) that is widely cited in the relevant literature. In these sequential environments, the teacher’s repair trajectories are designed to display a problem of acceptability with the formulations of students’ responses, rather than a problem with correct answers or linguistic accuracy, which resultantly engenders a preference for non-minimal turn-design (i.e., sentential construction) of students’ responses to the teacher’s initial questions. However, in following this preference, these trajectories go against the norms associated with repair and responding in ordinary conversation.

A common feature of hearing loss in young children is delayed language acquisition. While the Auditory-Verbal approach addresses this special need by promoting children’s speech development, the ways of accomplishing its pedagogical goals is particularly complex with an added concern of facilitating development with a sensitivity to the children’s abilities. I propose the repair trajectories in my data as a pedagogical tool of the Auditory-Verbal classroom and describe the types of repair techniques involved that ultimately bring the teacher and student to the repair solution. In doing so, I illustrate the mobility of other-initiated repair practices from an ordinary to an institutional setting, and how they can acquire new interactional meaning under the conditions of a specific social occasion. Data is drawn from 8 hours of video-recordings in one Auditory-Verbal classroom located in east Los Angeles.

Author

• Kristella Montiegel, UCLA