Repair

What is repair?

Repair is a term used in CA to refer ‘to practices for dealing with problems or troubles in speaking, hearing, and understanding the talk in conversation’ (Schegloff, 2000). It’s all about how participants organise their talk to identify and resolve troubles.

A “trouble” is athing deemed problematic within the conversation, not from a cognitive perspective, but a physical evidence from a transcripted conversation.

Fluency in normal talk is full of hesitancy, disruption.

Two way street in a conversation, one person must talk and think at the same time, the other must attentively listen.

imperative to get rid of problems or troubles as soon as possible, to engage with progressivity.

But don’t we already know about how the nature of errors and how they arise?

• We certainly have a number of perspectives on errors in speech and language – ranging from psychoanalytical to neuro-cognitive. • CA focuses on the social organisation of repair –how participants manage problems when they arise

When and where does repair occur?

• Anytime and anywhere! Because a trouble (e.g. a word error) can happen at any point in a conversation, so can repair • Repair is one the very few things in conversation that can arise at any point. • So, any item in talk is potentially ‘repairable’ because e.g. the speaker may choose to re-do it or the hearer may not have heard it

Noise enviroments,higher risk of trouble situation when someone attempts to change the topic change of the conversation.

Do not user “filler words” in coursework, as in do not use the term, lecturer does not like it.

What if a trouble or problem isn’t obvious?

• there may not be an obvious error • repair may occur even when there seems to be nothing ‘wrong’ e.g. the reformulation of a sentence

What’s so special about repair?

• Social order is created and maintained through conversation – if we don’t have a way of dealing with errors or troubles with speaking/listening then social order is at risk. We need ways of managing talk when it goes wrong • Repair is a particularly important concept for understanding about children learning language, or people with communication disorders or people with hearing disordersbecause their conversations can involve lots of repair

How does repair work?

Repair can be divided into two distinct activities: 1. initiation of repair - highlighting some aspect of the talk as the source of the problem (called the ‘trouble source’) by dealing with it, 2. outcome of repair (also termed ‘completion’ or just ‘repair’) - the speaker’s success or failure in completing the repair

Both initiation and outcome can be done by either self or other: 1. self-initiation of repair - i.e. initiate repair on own talk) (commonly displayed by cut-off (symbol: -) or ‘uhm’) 2. other-initiation of repair - i.e. initiate repair on another’s talk) e.g. ‘what?’, ‘huh?’, a partial repetition of prior turn, or ‘you mean’ + guess 3. self completion (‘self repair’) -i.e. completes repair on own talk 4. other completion (‘other repair’) –i.e. completes repair on another’s talk

“other” refers to the recipient of the conversation

sometimes

imcomprehensibility vs intelligebility

= show speech followed straightaway from another person

So, there are 4 possible types of repair:

• self-initiated self repair: repair is both initiated and carried out by the speaker of the trouble source • other-initiated self repair: repair is carried out by the speaker of the trouble source but initiated by another participant • self-initiated other repair: the speaker of the trouble source initiates repair but another speaker completes it (often occurs in word searches) • other-initiated other repair: a participant both initiates and carries out repair on another’s talk

Why do I need to be able to know about these four types of repair?

Because they aren’t all equal in frequency or significance • Repair is not the kind of activity people want to do all the time (it makes them possibly look incompetent and it interferes with the progression of the talk). • And in particular people appear to be wary of carrying out some types of repair too often, or even at all in certain circumstances

Time pressure

Claiming you have understood what is being said more polite than admitting you have not.

“oh” is state of change token

Why is repair such a delicate issue?

Repair and competence • Other initiated other repair is usually seen as sensitive because it means that one speaker is correcting another (i.e. the first speaker looks incompetent in some way). It is therefore regularly avoided even when it could be done. • Schegloff et al. (1977: 380-1): apparent exception to constrained occurrence of other repair = adultchild (esp. parent-child) interaction, or perhaps more generally ‘the not-yet-competent in some domain without respect to age’

Indeed, if there is a lot of ‘other’ type of repair at all in the conversation (e.g. other-initiated self repair or self-initiated other repair) then one or more of the participants risk looking as if something is up or something is going on (e.g. they’re having problems understanding each other)