“I’ll google it.”: Using an Online Dictionary for Conducting Repair during Pair and Group Work Activities in Upper-Secondary EFL Classrooms

“I’ll google it.”: Using an Online Dictionary for Conducting Repair during Pair and Group Work Activities in Upper-Secondary EFL Classrooms Adéla Červenková ABSTRACT: Pair and group work activities break the traditional teacher-centred structures of interaction and partly transfer the control of the teacher to the students, who are provided with more freedom in turn-taking and the management of activities. In the study of how students learn the target language, pair and group work repair sequences are particularly important in order to understand how the participants repair the breakdowns in communication and what processes for acquiring a foreign language they use. This study explores the different ways that students conduct conversational repair, i.e. negotiation of meaning, during pair and group work. Specifically, focusing on the sequences when a dictionary was consulted, this conversation-analytic study examines how the students incorporate the dictionary in those sequences and how its possible presence might influence the roles of experts and novices in the interaction, which gives insight into the epistemic dynamics in learner–learner interactions. The data used for this study consist of carefully synchronized audio and video recordings of students from five different Czech upper-secondary schools in their final year of studies during three to five consecutive EFL lessons. One of the central findings is that the students often try to conduct the repair through different means and the dictionary is used later in the interaction, which could indicate that the use of a dictionary is viewed as a last resort to check the meaning with the dictionary entry, as well as a tool to strengthen and/or weaken the epistemic roles of the participants. KEY WORDS conversation analysis, pair and group work, repair, negotiating meaning, online dictionary, epistemics, expert, novice 1. INTRODUCTION The present study explores a specific aspect of pair and group work interaction — using an online dictionary for negotiating meaning in repair sequences. It contributes to existing international research focused on using a dictionary and other language tools in learner–learner interaction, as seen in, for example, Barrow (2010), Reichert and Liebscher (2012) and Stone (2019). The conversation-analytic research of pair and group work interaction in language learning in the Czech educational context is rather limited (Tůma et al., 2019). By analysing the different means of incorporating the dictionary into the interaction and the ways in which the findings are shared in the groups, this research gives an insight into how students learn language in pair and group activities and, consequently, sheds light on the teaching implications when it comes to allowing language tools in EFL classrooms. OPEN ACCESS 44STUDIE Z APLIKOVANÉ LINGVISTIKY 2/2021 OPEN ACCESS In every interaction the participants negotiate the meaning of the dialogue in order to avoid and, if necessary, to overcome any problems in communication, and to ensure that both the speaker and the listener are able to understand each other. Language is then used to conduct those interactions in various settings and modalities of production and understanding. Whether it is institutional talk or mundane conversation, every interaction is orderly and follows a certain structure and rules. Institutional dialogue is defined by its participants who perform the roles of either the professional members of the institution (such as a court, hospital, school, etc.) or its clients (such as the citizens, patients, students, etc.). In the form of talk-ininteraction, the focus is on “how specific practices of talk embody or connect with specific identities and institutional tasks” (Heritage & Clayman, 2010, pp. 16–17). The institutionality of a dialogue is negotiated by its participants and their relationship with the institutional roles and identities, as well as through their management of the tasks and activities relevant to the institution. Classroom interaction is a form of institutional talk showing distinctive characteristics in the “distribution of knowledge, access to conversational resources, and to participation in the interaction”, as described by Drew and Heritage (1992, p. 49). In teacher-centred classrooms, the interactions tend to be heavily influenced by the teacher, who has greater rights to initiate and close sequences, as well as monitor the turn allocation and sequence organization (McHoul, 1978, pp. 184–185). Pair and group work then break the traditional teacher-centred structures of interaction and partly transfer the control of the teacher to the students, who are provided with more freedom in turn-taking allocation and the management of the activities. The difference in their proficiency allows the students to have a positive impact on each other’s language development as they can provide scaffolded assistance to each other (Dobao, 2012). The distance between the current level of development and the potential level that can be reached with the help of a more knowledgeable other has been described as the Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1978). Vygotsky states that individuals can learn from one another as knowledge is co-constructed and the learner then might reach higher levels of knowledge if provided with help and resources. During pair and group work activities, the learners can thus learn from each other and achieve more together than as individuals, specifically in repair sequences. Repair was first defined by Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks (1977) as speakers’ dealing with a problem in hearing, speaking and understanding. In their research, they distinguished between four major types of repair based on who the initiator and conductor is — self-initiated repair, other-initiated repair, self-repair and other repair. They investigated the organization of repair, the usual place where it is initiated and conducted, and revealed a strong preference for self-repair in ordinary conversation. McHoul (1990) then shifted his focus to the organization of repair sequences in classroom interaction, which inevitably follows the rules of turn-taking in institutional dialogue, given its setting. His findings showed the difference in frequency of occurrence of the various types of repair, revealing that other repair appears fairly often with the teacher correcting the students’ talk. Markee (2000) focused on the organization of repair in equal and unequal power speech exchange systems, thus differentiating between repair in frontal teaching and pair and group work i nteractions. adéla červenková45 The roles of initiators and conductors often change given the distribution of knowledge, or rather the lack thereof. The understanding of what is mutually known and what might be unknown to the speakers, as studied in epistemics, is fundamental for maintaining interaction and being able to recognizably refer to people, places (...truncated)