Self-Repair Strategies in English Conversations to Teach English Interaction Skill

Journal of English Language Education Vol. 3(2) 2020: 205-231 Edulangue SELF-REPAIR STRATEGIES TO PROMOTE INTERACTIONAL SKILLS OF EFL LEARNERS Latifah Fatmawati Universitas Sebelas Maret, Adi Irma Suryadi Universitas Sebelas Maret, Abstract Self-repair strategies play a crucial role in maintaining communication between the interlocutors amid communicative barriers. Ergo, it is of paramount importance for English teachers to equip the students with such strategies for them to nurture the interaction during which the conversation takes place. This paper aimed to investigate the repair strategies in the conversations about everyday familiar topics from the American television sitcom, from which the English materials were designed. The characters' utterances and occurrences were respectively analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. The findings showed that six kinds of self-initiated self-repair strategies were used, while the most frequently used was repetition, followed by hesitation pauses, and searching a word. This paper provides some suggestions for applying self-initiated self-repair strategies for teaching English spoken interactional skills. Keywords: Self-repair, English conversations, English Spoken Interaction Skills, CEFR. INTRODUCTION In this technological era, there are many ways to teach the interactional skills in foreign languages, especially with regard to English conversation. People need and use English in daily conversation. A conversation is a form of oral communication 205 Fatmawati, L., & Suryadi, A. I. , Self-Repair Strategies to Promote Interactional ... between people in daily life. The conversation is a medium of utterances and acts which demonstrate the transactional and interactional functions of language (Labov, Fanshel, 1977; Salmani & Nodoushan, 1995). In conversations, the speakers and interlocutors have to engage in communicative language activities. In many turns, they change their positions as producers and receivers. However, what have been said by the speakers could not always be understood by the interlocutors in the same intended meaning. In some conditions, the speakers have difficulties to convey the messages through the utterances. In order to prevent troubles in communication that may occur in conversations, speakers and interlocutors have to develop their communicative repair strategy (Canale & Swain, 1980; Meadan & Halle, 2004). In education, teachers should understand the concept of communicative competence. It is a process in which the speaker first evaluates the social context of conversations and encoding the communicative options available to get and understand the messages (Canale & Swain, 1980). Teachers should apply the communicative competence in providing language knowledge to build learners' confidence, self-awareness of their abilities and weaknesses (Savignon, 1997). Teachers could apply any methods and learning styles to make students get meaningful learning and develop their skills through communicative learning (Natividad, 2018). Moreover, teachers should apply strategic competence to recognize and fix barriers in communication. Repair is the treatment of issues that occur in interactive language usage or a method that operates in conversation to resolve the problems of speaking, listening, and understanding the communication (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977). This requires the process of mutual comprehensions such as word quest, as well as a substitution or correction of hearable errors or mistakes. Therefore, teaching repair strategies is the sine qua non of effective 206 Edulangue Vol. 3(2) 2020 communication for the English learners to nurture their interaction during which the conversation takes place. During conversations, people often use Self-initiated selfrepair (SISR). This is a case where the learners experience trouble in their utterances and they initiate repair in their classroom interactions. Previous research demonstrates that the most frequent strategies of SISR used by English native speakers and Iranian EFL learners are replacing and inserting, while deleting remains scantily recorded (Emrani & Hooshmand, 2019). In other research, it was found that strategies of repair in English conversations remained in use, which were taken from English films and made some suggestions to B2 level learners of English (Hoa & Hạnh, 2016). In other cases, the speakers of Asian Englishes are engaged in selfrepair when no corrections are needed to be made (Shinhee Lee, 2005). They employ their own characteristic signature phrase and each interlocutor's respective signature phrase serves multiple functions at different times in their discourse. It encapsulates that the repair strategies can provide some insight into learners’ general perceptions and awareness of the target language, their weakness, and their language acquisition strategies. This paper aimed to investigate the strategies of repair in conversations about everyday familiar topics from the American television sitcom. The following research questions the whole part of this study: 1. What kinds of repair strategies were used in English conversations in the American television sitcom? 2. How to implement repair strategies from English conversations in the American television sitcom to the teaching of the English spoken interaction skill? The purpose of this paper was to highlight the importance of self-repair strategies and make some suggestions to apply these 207 Fatmawati, L., & Suryadi, A. I. , Self-Repair Strategies to Promote Interactional ... strategies in teaching English spoken interaction skills to English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in Indonesia. LITERATURE REVIEW Repair Strategies Repairs are endemic in conversation (Clark, 2020). Rieger (2003) defines ‘repair’ as error correction. Schegloff et al. (1977, p. 361) defined that repair is dealing with repeated speaking, hearing, and understanding problems. In addition, these are not necessarily about linguistic problems (e.g. pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax, or others.), but it may also be related to acceptability problems, such as saying something wrong in a broad sense, that is untrue, inappropriate or irrelevant (Schegloff, 2007). Reparation, therefore, refers to the treatment of issues that arise in the interactive use of language or a method that operates in conversation to resolve the problems of speaking, listening, and understanding communication (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977). It is evidenced by second language acquisition research, that both native and non-native speakers of English use repair strategies while negotiating meaning in order to understand or make themselves understood. For example, West (2018) who investigated the use of repair strategies during fluency activities in multilingual EDC classes, found that use of repair by Japanese students is more frequent with a listening partner who is also Japanese and less frequent with a partner (...truncated)