Uncovering Iranian EFL Learners’ Repair Operations’ Employment in Story-Retelling
Keywords:
Conversation Analysis, Repair Operations, Self-Initiated Self-Completed Repair, Story-RetellingAbstract
Abstract: Although Iranian EFL learners’ practices concerning the process of repair have been investigated by some researchers the state of Iranian EFL learners’ use of repair operations in narratives and story-retelling is underexplored. This study aimed to investigate how Iranian EFL learners manage communication during story retelling and identify the repair operations they use to overcome communication breakdowns. Based on Schegloff's theoretical framework of 10 repair operations, this study examined the preferences of forty EFL learners regarding the use of repair operations. In addition, the relationship between the gender and English proficiency level of EFL learners and repair operations in story retelling was investigated. After analyzing forty monologues totaling 183 minutes, the findings show that nonlinguistic repair operation and parenthesizing are the most and least frequently used operation. Moreover, recycling, replacing, deletion and insertion are found to be the second, third, fourth and fifth most frequent repair operations while abortion, searching, reformatting and sequence jumping are considered less used by the EFL learners. Additionally, the results of crosstabulation and chi-square tests show no statistically association between proficiency levels and repair operations as well as gender and repair operations employment by EFL learners in story-retelling. The findings might be useful to researchers, language educators and syllabus designers.
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