Redressing the Roles of Correction

and Repair in Research on Second

and Foreign Language Learning
JOAN KELLY HALL
Department of Applied Linguistics
305 Sparks Building
The Pennsylvania State University
University Park, Pennsylvania 16802
Email: jkh11@psu.edu

Correction and repair as components of an instructional practice that facilitates learning have
figured prominently in research on classroom-based second and foreign language learning.1
Recent studies incorporating a conversation analytic (CA) perspective on second language
acquisition (SLA) have also focused on repair and correction. From a CA perspective, the
practice of repair is a fundamental organization of interaction for dealing with troubles in
achieving common understanding about the interactional work that parties in an interaction
are doing together. Correction is a particular type of repair in which errors are replaced with
what is correct. Applying this understanding to studies using CA to examine language classroom
interaction, we find that although the CA terms repair and correction are used, in many cases,
the focus of analysis is on the instructional components of correction and repair. I argue
that conflating the CA practice and the instructional components misconstrues the former
and, in so doing, conceals the important role that each set of practices plays in language
classrooms. To make my case, I review research on correction and repair from both CA and
SLA perspectives, laying out their distinctive features, and then use these understandings to
examine the treatment of repair and correction in studies using CA to study SLA. I conclude
with a brief discussion of implications for CA-based research on second and foreign language
learning.

IN STUDIES ON CLASSROOM-BASED SECOND classroom talk, drawing in particular on CA’s no-

and foreign language (L2 and FL) learning, much
analytic attention has been given to the concepts
of repair and correction as components of an
instructional practice used to facilitate language
learning. In the research, the terms are used in-
terchangeably to refer to actions taken by teach-
ers and students that point to and help learners
modify target language forms that are problem-
atic to them. Another body of research with spe-
cific interests in repair and correction has recently
emerged in studies of second language acquisi-
tion (SLA). This work incorporates a conversation
analytic (CA) perspective on naturally occurring
The Modern Language Journal, 91, iv, (2007)
0026-7902/07/511–526 $1.50/0
C 2007 The Modern Language Journal
⃝
tions of repair and correction. In CA, the practice
of repair is a fundamental organizational frame-
work of interaction for dealing with problems
or troubles related to the achievement of com-
mon understanding about the interactional work
that interlocutors are doing together. Correction
is one type of repair in which errors are overtly
fixed. Applying this understanding to the studies
using CA to investigate language classroom inter-
actions, we find that although the CA terms repair
and correction are used to describe what happens,
in many cases, the instances of examined talk are
not CA repair practices at all. Rather, they are
examples of the two instructional practice com-
ponents of repair and correction. In this article, I
will argue that conflating the CA practice of repair
and the instructional practice components of re-
pair and correction misconstrues the former and,
512
thus, conceals the distinct and important work
that each set of practices does in language class-
rooms. To make my case, I first review current
research on repair and correction from both the
CA and the SLA literature, laying out the con-
ceptual and analytic distinctions between them. I
then examine how studies using CA to study L2
and FL learning employ these terms. In the ex-
amination, I highlight the analytical and concep-
tual confusion engendered from treating the two
sets of practices as equivalent. I conclude with a
brief discussion of what I consider to be significant
implications for CA-based research on language
learning.
REPAIR AND CORRECTION IN CA
Initiated in the field of sociology, CA is the study
of the social organization of talk-in-interaction
(Heritage, 1998, 2006; Hutchby & Wooffitt, 2004;
Pomerantz, 1984; Sacks, 1972; Sacks, Schegloff,
& Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff, 2007; Schegloff, Jef-
ferson, & Sacks, 1977; ten Have, 2005). The ap-
proach is founded on three premises concerning
the organization of talk-in-interaction. First, what
a speaker produces in a current turn-at-talk, both
in meaning and in form, is oriented to the im-
mediately preceding turn. Second, a current turn
projects or calls for the next action or range of
possible actions to be accomplished in the next
turn-at-talk, and in so doing, creates a context for
the next turn. Third, in producing the next ac-
tion, an interlocutor displays an understanding of
the prior turn, and thereby creates or maintains
with the prior speaker a mutual understanding of
what they are doing together.
Three units found to be fundamental to the
achievement of social order in talk-in-interaction
are turn-taking, sequence organization, and re-
pair. Although repair is the main concern here, I
will briefly summarize the other two units because
they are pertinent to my later discussion on lan-
guage classroom interaction. The organization of
turn-taking concerns the construction and distri-
bution of turns among participants in interaction
and comprises two components: turn construc-
tional units, concerning the basic units by which
turns are constructed, and turn allocational units,
concerning how turns are allocated. Sequence or-
ganization is, as Schegloff (2007) noted, “the vehi-
cle for getting some activity accomplished” (p. 2)
and concerns the organization of courses of action
that are accomplished through turns-at-talk. The
basic unit of sequence organization is the adja-
cency pair, which consists of two adjacently placed
turns, the first pair part and the second pair part,
The Modern Language Journal 91 (2007)
taken by two different speakers. The first pair part
initiates an exchange and projects a relevant sec-
ond pair part or set of possible relevant second
pair parts as a response. Participants orient to the
relevancy of adjacency pairs to manage and dis-
play to each other their ongoing understanding
of what they are doing together.
A third fundamental unit of talk-in-interaction
is repair. Repair is “‘the self-righting’ mechanism”
(Schegloff et al., 1977, p. 381) of talk that allows
individuals to deal with troubles in speaking and
hearing that threaten their shared understand-
ings of the work they are doing together in their
talk. Their shared understanding is a practical
concern and is continually managed by individ-
uals as their course of action unfolds. In their
turns-at-talk, participants coordinate both the dis-
play and design of the topic of talk and the dis-
play and design of a turn’s “sequential implicative-
ness” (Schegloff, 1991, p. 158), in other words, the
projection of the range of possible next turns by
the action undertaken in the current turn. At any
moment, misunderstandings can arise about ei-
ther the topic or sequential implicativeness of a
turn. For example, there can be misunderstand-
ings about a reference made in a prior or present
turn containing an ambiguous pronoun or other
deictic item, or about whether a turn was meant
to be serious or humorous, to be a compliment or
a criticism. Difficulties can also arise when words
are not available when needed, or from mishear-
ings or an inability to hear due to noise in the
surrounding physical environment or uncertainty
about what is heard. When such troubles arise, the
course of action is interrupted, and repair pro-
cedures are invoked by participants to rectify or
repair their mutually produced interactional re-
ality and reestablish their shared understanding
(Schegloff, 1992). Repair is not a regular part of
a sequence of action. It is, instead, inserted into
an ongoing course of action as needed by par-
ticipants to reestablish mutual understanding of
their talk-in-interaction.
Repair practices do not address “all divergences
or difficulties of understanding” (Schegloff, 1992,
p. 1341, italics added). Instead, they deal with
“only the narrower domain of understanding what
someone has just said” (Schegloff, 2000, p. 207),
that is, with difficulties presented by “the produc-
tion and uptake of the talk itself” (Schegloff, 1992,
p. 1341). Although the scope of repair is limited
to addressing troubles in speaking and hearing,
the class of repairables, or trouble sources them-
selves is, in fact, so much wider that, as Schegloff
et al. (1977) noted, “it appears that nothing is,
in principle, excludable” (p. 363). Any feature of
Joan Kelly Hall
an interactional moment has the potential to be
taken up as a source of trouble by either party
in the interaction. When trouble does arise, the
actions of repair halt or stall the course of action
so that the trouble can be dealt with, and once
the repair is completed, the course of action is
resumed. Because of their special role in talk-in-
interaction, repair actions can supersede all other
actions, meaning that they can “replace or defer
whatever else was due next” (Schegloff, 2000, p.
208) in the course of action, be it a next sound or
word in a turn-constructional unit, a next turn in
a sequence, or something else. Moreover, repair
appears to be the only interactional practice that
has this property (Schegloff, 2000).
Repair practices have two components, the re-
pair initiation and the repair outcome, and their
accomplishment can vary depending on who ini-
tiates the repair operation and who completes
it. One configuration is self-initiated self-repair
(SISR), in which the repair is initiated and com-
pleted by the participant producing the trouble.
SISR can occur either in the same turn in which
the trouble source occurs, in the turn’s transition
space, or in the third turn to the turn with the
trouble source. Excerpt 1 provides one example
of an SISR. In this excerpt, repair is initiated, and
the trouble is repaired in the same turn.
In a second configuration, self-initiated other-
repair (SIOR), the repair operation is initiated by
the participant producing the trouble in the first
turn and repaired by the recipient in the next
turn. Excerpt 2 provides an example in which
the recipient, A, completes the repair initiated
in speaker B’s turn.
Other-initiated self-repair (OISR) is a third con-
figuration. In OISR, the recipient of a turn inter-
EXCERPT 1
(Schegloff et al., 1977, p. 363)
Ken: Sure enough ten minutes later the bell r- the doorbell rang
EXCERPT 2
(Schegloff et al., 1977, p. 364)
B: He had dis un Mistuh W-whatever k- I can’t think of his first
name, Watts on, the one thet wrote // that piece,
A: Dan Watts.
EXCERPT 3
(Wong, 2000, p. 248)
Jane: So (.) the night that Sun called he was calling to tell us you had your baby?
(0.2)
→ Huang: Who?
Jane: Sun:: called
(0.2)
Huang: Mm hmm
513
rupts the course of action by initiating repair of
a trouble source in the speaker’s turn, which is
then repaired by the producer of the trouble in
the third turn. Excerpt 3 contains an example of
an OISR in which the recipient indicates difficulty
understanding what the speaker, Jane, has said,
and therefore initiates repair through her use of
the question word who. Jane then completes the
repair in the next turn.
A final configuration is other-initiated other-
repair (OIOR). In this configuration, the
recipient interrupts the course of action and both
initiates and completes the repair of the trouble
identified in the recipient’s initiation. This con-
figuration is illustrated in Excerpt 4, where we see
Larry, in the first turn, producing an item that is
both identified as a trouble source and corrected
by Norm, the recipient, in the next turn.
Although any of these four configurations can
occur at any time in talk-in-interaction, studies of
repair show that, overwhelmingly, the preferred
arrangement is SISR (Schegloff et al., 1977).
Repair initiations in this configuration are of-
ten marked by speech perturbations, including
glottal stops, lengthened sounds, uh, and so on.
An example of such markings can be found in
Excerpt 5.
Other-initiated repairs (OIRs), which are un-
dertaken in the next turn by the recipient, mark
something in the speaker’s turn as being prob-
lematic to the recipient in terms of hearing or
understanding it, and serve to initiate a resolu-
tion. The insertion of an OIR into the sequence
of ongoing action puts the projected next turn
on hold until the trouble is dealt with. Several
devices are used to accomplish OIRs, including
repetition of all or part of the preceding turn; the
514 The Modern Language Journal 91 (2007)

EXCERPT 4
(Jefferson, 1987, p. 87)
Larry: They’re going to drive ba:ck Wednesday.
→ Norm: Tomorrow.
Larry: Tomorrow. Righ[t.
Norm: [M-hm,
Larry: They’re working half day.

EXCERPT 5
(Schegloff et al., 1977, p. 367)
A: W-when’s yer uh, weh-you have one day y’only have one course uh?

use of question words such as who, where, when,
and what; the use of expressions such as excuse
me or pardon; and the use of alternative questions
(Koshik, 2005; Schegloff, 1997). An example of an
OIR using repetition can be found in Excerpt 6.
The excerpt is taken from a phone call from a
Danish buyer, D, to a Belgian company, B. Here,
we see in line 3 the recipient, B, repeating part of
D’s utterance to check B’s understanding of D’s
utterance. In line 4, D confirms the understand-
ing, and the conversation continues.
Corrections are a commonly used tool for fixing
trouble in producing, hearing, or understanding
a turn and can occur in both self- and other-repair.
We can see a correction in Excerpt 1, where the
speaker corrects himself by replacing the word
bell with doorbell . Likewise, in Excerpt 4, Norm,
the recipient, corrects Larry by replacing Wednes-
day with tomorrow. Although repair can involve
the explicit correction of an error when needed
to sustain mutual understanding, it does not have
to. In fact, studies of repair show that repair is
regularly used where there are no apparent er-
rors to be corrected, and also evidence errors
in talk that go uncorrected (Hutchby & Wooffitt,
2004; Jefferson, 1987; Schegloff, Koshik, Jacoby, &
Olsher, 2002).
It should be noted that, although the devices
just mentioned are regularly used as repair tools
to initiate and fix troubles in talk, they can also
accomplish other actions depending on the inter-
actional circumstances of their use (Lerner, 2004;
Schegloff, 1997). For example, expressions that
can initiate other-repair such as excuse me and
pardon can also be used to initiate remedial ex-
changes or to signal for a turn. Likewise, huh can
be used to seek a response to a question that has
not been answered, and the question words what
and where can be used to promote further telling,
as illustrated in Excerpt 7, in which a mother uses
where to ask for more information from a child.
Likewise, repetitions can be used to display an
emotional stance such as surprise or interest or to
register receipt of what was just said (Schegloff,
1997; Svennevig, 2004). And, as we will see in
the next section, corrections, too, can accomplish
other actions in addition to repairing troubles in
talk.
To know whether a device is doing repair entails
more than looking for instances of such devices.

EXCERPT 6
(Brouwer, Rasmussen, & Wagner, 2004, p. 91)
1. D: perhaps you coult=eh send it by flight and eh parcel ↓ post
2. (0.8)
→ 3. B: send it by uh air parcel p↓o[st?
4. D: [yes:
5. (0.6)
6. is that possible
7. B: yes
EXCERPT 7
(Schegloff, 1997, p. 518)
Kid: I know where yer goin.
Mom: Where.
Kid: To the uh (eighth grade)=
Mom: Yeah. Right.
Joan Kelly Hall
It also demands a close look at the preceding turn
to see whether it includes some item that could
be targeted as a trouble source in the recipient’s
hearing or understanding. It also calls for a close
look at the next turn to see if the course of ac-
tion projected by the turn with the trouble source
has been put on hold. Although in some cases
the determination of whether a device or unit
serves to initiate repair is clear, in others it can
be ambiguous (Schegloff, 1997). In these cases,
the ambiguity can arise from the analyst’s lack of
ethnographic knowledge to which the individuals
in the interaction are orienting at that moment.
As Schegloff (1997) noted, the ambiguity can also
be “internal to the data” (p. 520); that is, it can be
in the talk itself because individuals “do speak in
ambiguous ways” (p. 520).
In sum, repair is a fundamental unit of talk
that allows for catching and resolving troubles in
speaking and hearing as they arise in the course of
action in which participants are engaged as that
action unfolds. When invoked by the participants,
repair stops the course of action so that the partic-
ipants can deal with the trouble. Once the trou-
ble is resolved, the course of action is resumed.
Although there are several ways to initiate and
resolve troubles, SISR is the preferred, in other
words, the most frequently used arrangement.
When someone other than the speaker initiates
repair, devices such as repetitions and question
words are often used. Once a trouble source is
marked, fixing it can, but does not have to, en-
tail correction, either by the self or the other.
Finally, there is no “one-to-one practice/action
pairing” (Schegloff, 1997, p. 505). Constructions
such as repetitions that are regularly used to ini-
tiate repair do not always or only accomplish that
action. Analysts of interaction are therefore ad-
vised “to remain alert to an action-formation re-
source pool, in which practices, deployed always
in some position, can accomplish different actions”
(p. 505).
CORRECTION AND REPAIR IN LANGUAGE
INSTRUCTION
Interest in correction and repair as components
of instructional practice in language classrooms
can be traced to two bodies of research. The first
has its theoretical roots in the interaction hypoth-
esis (Long, 1996), which asserts that negotiated
interaction facilitates learners’ target language ac-
quisition by helping to draw their attention to
gaps in their knowledge of linguistic forms. Ne-
gotiated interaction is defined as the interactional
515
work that native speakers or more proficient users
and learners of the target language do to draw the
learners’ attention to mismatches between linguis-
tic forms they know and those they do not know.
In such interaction, it is not the meaning of what
is being talked about or the meaning of the activ-
ity itself that is negotiated because such meaning
“is already evident to the learner” (Doughty &
Williams, 1998, p. 4). Rather, the concern is with
“the linguistic apparatus needed to get the mean-
ing across” (p. 4).
A great deal of research based on the interac-
tion hypothesis has given its attention to the in-
structional nature of negotiated interaction itself,
and, in particular, to corrective feedback—the
means or devices by which teachers or more pro-
ficient target language users, direct learners’ at-
tention to errors in their production of the target
language (e.g., Gass, 1997; Lightbown & Spada,
2006; Long, 1996; Long, Inagaki, & Ortega, 1998;
Long & Robinson, 1998; Lyster, 1998; Lyster &
Ranta, 1997; Mackey, Gass, & McDonough, 2000;
Mackey & Philp, 1998; Morris, 2002; Nicholas,
Lightbown, & Spada, 2001; Oliver & Mackey, 2003;
Pica, 2002). This work relies heavily on the as-
sumption that providing corrective feedback to
learners on their nontarget-like use of the target
language facilitates their language acquisition be-
cause it helps learners to “connect[s] input, inter-
nal learner capacities, particular selective atten-
tion, and output in productive ways” (Long, 1996,
p. 452). In this research, the term correction is used
to refer to a particular kind of corrective feed-
back and, more generally, to the act of remediat-
ing a learner-produced error in spoken or written
discourse. Findings have revealed that corrective
feedback in classrooms has several formulations,
including explicit correction, recasts, repetitions,
prompts, and so on. Although the term repair is
less often used, when it does appear, it is used in
the same way as correction. Figure 1 contains ex-
amples of the different formulations of corrective
feedback.
Although findings are mixed as to the effective-
ness of corrective feedback in leading learners to
notice and correct errors in their target language
production, they suggest that its use as an instruc-
tional tool is widespread in language classrooms
across contexts, languages, and age groups.
A second strand of research dealing with
the instructional role of correction and repair
in language classrooms has its roots in dis-
course analytic studies of naturally occurring
first-language-classroom interaction (Baker, 1992;
Barnes, 1992; Cazden, 1988; Edwards & Westgate,
516 The Modern Language Journal 91 (2007)
FIGURE 1
Corrective Feedback

Explicit Correction: Giving the correct form

S: Put in my box.
→T: You’re missing the direct object pronoun it. It should be Put it in my box.
Clarification Request: Asking for more or more clearly stated information.
T: How long have you been here?
S: Ten
→T: Ten what?
S: Ten days.
Repetition: Repeating the student’s utterance with the error and usually with rising intonation.
S: She have the book.
→T: She have the book?
Prompt: Repeating part of an utterance, leaving the student to fill in the rest with the correct form
S: She have the book.
→T: She…?
Recasts or Reformulations: Restating all or part of a student’s utterance but using the correct form
S: My mother go home last night.
→T: Your mother went home last night?
Metalinguistic Feedback: Providing information on the form needed but without providing the correct form
to the student
S: My mother go home last night.
→T: What is the past tense of go?

1994; Gutierrez, 1994; Heap, 1992; Lemke, 1990;
Lerner, 1995; Macbeth, 1994, 2004; McHoul,
1978; Mehan, 1979; Nassaji & Wells, 2000; Sin-
clair & Coulthard, 1975; Tharp & Gallimore,
1991; Wells, 1999). A basic premise of this re-
search is that classroom interaction is a primary
means by which learning is accomplished in class-
rooms. Findings reveal classroom interaction to
be comprised primarily of a specialized teacher-
led sequence of three actions: a teacher-initiated
known-answer question, a student response to
that question, and teacher feedback on the suffi-
ciency or correctness of the response (initiation–
response–feedback, or IRF). The central task of
the IRF is instructional. The elicitation of stu-
dent responses with known-answer questions al-
lows teachers to determine if the students know
the material, and how well. The feedback serves
to evaluate the responses, and when necessary, to
remediate knowledge deemed inaccurate or in-
sufficient. There are several ways that feedback
can be accomplished. In addition to the correc-
tive feedback devices I have already noted, teach-
ers can ask for more information or clarification.
They can also request an expansion or justifica-
tion of a response (Nassaji & Wells, 2000). The
third part of the sequence, the teacher feedback
to the student response, gives the sequence “a
specifically instructional tenor” (Heritage, 2004,
p. 125).
Research has also shown that, regardless of the
kind of feedback given in the course of action,
the teacher decides what counts as responses
in need of correction or remediation and what
counts as correct or sufficient responses (Drew,
1981). Here, as in the research on negotiated in-
teraction, correction, and the less frequently used
term, repair , are used to refer to the remediation
of learner-produced errors. The turn-taking or-
ganization is also specialized, in that there are
restrictions on who may speak and the kinds of
contributions they may make. In orienting to this
specialized system of exchange, individuals dis-
play their specific institutional identities of teach-
ers and students whose turns in the sequence
both reflect and embody differential access to re-
sources and to power (Heritage, 2004). Their con-
tinual orientation to the specialized sequence of
action and their roles in it are the primary means
by which teachers and students “display and recog-
nize that instructing is going on” (Macbeth, 2004,
p. 729).
Studies of L2 and FL classroom interaction
(e.g., Hall, 1995, 1998, 2004; Haneda, 2004; Lin,
1999a, 1999b; Mondada & Pekarek, 2004; Poole,
1992; Richards, 2006; Toohey, 1998) have con-
firmed the ubiquity of this specialized sequence
of instruction in language classroom interaction
and its power as an “instrument of pedagogic
purpose and teacher control” (Richards, 2006, p.
54). In their interactions with students, language
teachers pose a question or directive to a student,
who is expected to provide a brief, correctable re-
sponse in the target language to which the teacher
Joan Kelly Hall
provides some kind of evaluative feedback. If the
response is determined to be insufficient or inac-
curate in any way, the feedback takes the form of
one or more of the variations noted earlier. For ex-
ample, it can repeat the response, it can prompt,
it can ask for clarification or expansion, and so
on.
Excerpt 8 is taken from a study of a high school
FL Spanish classroom (Hall, 2004) where the IRF
was the central interactional structure of instruc-
tion. In the excerpt, we see that the teacher begins
the sequence (in line 1) with a question directed
to a student. Her attempt to guide the student into
a response by ending her turn with the prompt sı́
suggests that the teacher is not looking for infor-
mation or opinion from the student but for a spe-
cific correctable response in the target language.
When the student hesitates, the teacher provides
the response she is seeking for the student to re-
peat in line 3, which the student does in line 4.
With her repetition of the student’s response in
line 5, the teacher both affirms its correctness and
provides a positive evaluation.
517
Excerpt 9 is another example of the IRF in a
language classroom. It is taken from a study by
Mondada and Pekarek (2004) of an L2 French
classroom in Switzerland designed for newly ar-
rived immigrant children between the ages of 10
and 12 years. In this excerpt, we see the teacher
(T), in line 18, begin the sequence by directing
a student (L) to provide a grammatically correct
statement using a particular phrase, which the stu-
dent does in lines 19 and 20. With her ok in line
21, T marks the response as correct. This evalu-
ation is followed in line 23 by another student’s
(P) response to T’s initial directive. No feedback
is given to P’s response, and student K apparently
takes that absence as a signal to continue with his
turn to comply with the directive, which he does
in line 25. To this response T responds with an
explicit correction in line 27, which K repeats in
line 28. Mondada and Pekarek did not tell us the
frequency with which the IRF sequence occurs in
this classroom. However, the students’ fairly effort-
less participation in attending to the task and in
knowing the actions that teacher initiations and

EXCERPT 8
(Hall, 2004, p. 78)
1. T: tu tienes sueño señor↑ la verdad, sı́
2. S3: ( )
3. T: tengo sueño
4. S3: sı́ tengo sueño
5. T: sı́ tengo sueño sı́ tengo sueño

EXCERPT 9
(Mondada & Pekarek, 2004, p. 508)
o
18 T: chhhh::::::o (.) Lorena une phrase avec ce[tte (trousse)
o
chhhh::::::o (.) Lorena a phrase with th[is pencil case
19 L: [cette trousse
[this pencil case
20 est dans ma valise
is in my bag
21 T: ok[é:. (.) ou]ais:,
ok[ay:. (.) ye]ah:,
22 B: [( )]
23 P: cette trousse est à moi
This pencil case is mine
24 J: ((cough))
25 K: cette trousse est [(0.3) dans ma:] (0.9) ma sac
this pencil case is [(0.3) in my: (fem.)] (0.9) bag
26 J: [((cough))]
◦
27 T: mon:,◦
◦
my:,◦ (masc.)
28 K: mon sac
my bag
29 T: sac.
bag.
30 (0.7)
518
evaluations are doing in the sequence and their
sequential implicativeness (in other words, what
actions are expected to follow them in terms of
the students’ own contributions to the sequence)
display their competence in recognizing the goal
of the instructional sequence and their roles as
students in it.
Two recent studies by Hellermann (2003, 2005)
provided even more architectural detail on the
IRF. The data for both studies came from two class-
rooms: a Grade 12 physics class and a Grade 11
American history class at an urban public high
school in the midwestern United States.2 In the
2003 study, Hellermann examined the use of four
prosodic cues—pitch contour, pitch level, timing,
and rhythm—in the third feedback slot to indi-
cate how the student response in the second turn
was being evaluated. Indicators of positive assess-
ments included repetitions of student responses
with falling pitch contour and a midlevel pitch
that, while matching the intonation of the re-
sponse, lasted slightly longer. Indicators of incom-
plete or negatively assessed student responses in-
cluded repetitions ending with a slightly rising
pitch contour. Figure 2 displays the pitch tracks
of a student’s response (I know, food) and the
teacher’s repetition ( food), which, by its partic-
ular prosodic arrangement, serves as a positive
assessment of the student response.
In the 2005 study, Hellermann examined the
syntactic resources employed in initiating an IRF
sequence. One frequently used resource in the
first slot is a specialized question template. The
template differs from the canonical wh–question
FIGURE 2
Pitch Tracks of Student Response and Teacher Feedback Moves
(Hellermann, 2003, p. 90)
24
Pitch-relative semitones
16
food
know
I
Note. H = high; M = mid; L = low.
The Modern Language Journal 91 (2007)
format, characterized by the use of do as a support
and an inverted subject–verb arrangement, in that
it locates the question word at the end of the ut-
terance, creating a fill-in-the-blank template for
students to complete. Excerpt 10 illustrates this
pattern.
As we can see in the first elicitation, rather than
using the canonical question form, In which of
these three regions did most of them live? the teacher
begins the turn as an assertion and inserts the
question word toward the end, stating “most of
them lived in which of the three regions?” The
same fill-in-the-blank format is used in the second
elicitation. A second syntactic resource noted by
Hellermann (2005) is the use of an and–prefaced
elicitation structure in the third slot, after the stu-
dent response is assessed, to extend the elicitation
of student knowledge. Line 17 in Excerpt 11 con-
tains an example of an and–prefaced structure,
following a positive assessment of the student re-
sponse in line 16.
In sum, taken together, the research on class-
room interaction from both the interactional
and discourse analytic bodies of research reveals
that classroom interaction comprises a distinctive
three-part sequence of action that is specialized
for instruction. The first turn, a teacher initiation
in the form of a known-answer question, makes
a correctable response by the student relevant in
the second turn. The response provides the se-
quential possibility of feedback in the third turn,
which serves to instruct students in the correct-
ness or sufficiency of their knowledge. Correction,
and, more generally, the various formulations of
food
M
Joan Kelly Hall
EXCERPT 10
(Hellermann, 2005, p. 118)
1st elicitation T: → most of them lived in which of the three regions.
students: middle
T: the middle.
2nd elicitation T: → with the exception of ↑ what major group,
EXCERPT 11
(Hellermann, 2005, p. 110)
16 Al: [>owning LAND.<
17 T:→ [owning land. and WHERE was there (.) always going to
18 Tina: [I mean- yeah
19 T: be more land available
20 Jin: [the west
21 Al: [the west
corrective feedback such as repetitions, recasts,
and prompts, in addition to requests for clarifica-
tion, expansion, justification, and so on, are possi-
ble actions for accomplishing response feedback
in the third turn. The microanalytic details from
discourse analytic research in particular allow us
to see these subtle but significant interactional
complexities by which teachers and students ori-
ent to their institutional identities and both dis-
play and recognize that instructing is going on in
the three-part sequence.
REPAIR AND CORRECTION IN STUDIES
USING CA TO STUDY SLA
Although there has been interest in using the
tools of CA to examine classroom-based L2 and
FL learning since the 1980s (e.g., Kasper, 1985;
van Lier, 1988), the last decade or so has seen a
noticeable increase in such interest (e.g., Buckwal-
ter, 2001; Hamilton, 2004; He, 2004; Jung, 1999;
Kasper, 2004; Koshik, 2002; Liebscher & Dailey-
O’Cain, 2003; Markee, 2000, 2004; Mori, 2002,
2004; Seedhouse, 1999, 2004; Shonerd, 1994;
Smartt & Scudder, 2004). Much of this attention
has been given to CA repair3 practices, and in
particular to describing how CA repair and CA
correction are enacted in language classroom in-
teraction using the four configurations noted in
the earlier discussion as a framework.
However, keeping in mind CA’s notions of re-
pair and correction, if we look more closely at
these studies, we find that, although they may
draw on the organization of CA repair to examine
what happens in classroom interactions, in many
cases what takes place is not repair or correction in
the traditional CA sense at all. That is, the purpose
519
of the identified episodes is not to identify and
rectify some trouble in speaking or hearing that
threatens the participants’ shared understanding
of what they are doing together. Instead, these in-
stances of talk appear to be examples of the IRF
instructional sequence of action, and, in partic-
ular, of the third turn of the sequence in which
instructional correction appears.
The conflation of instructional correction and
CA correction as a type of CA repair in exami-
nations of language classroom interaction can be
traced back to the early work of Kasper (1985)
and van Lier (1988), both of whom proposed a
conceptual framework for understanding instruc-
tional correction practices in language classroom
interaction that was built on a framework of CA re-
pair. Almost 20 years later, and despite the many
advances in CA on repair, the same conceptual
confusion continues, most notably in Seedhouse’s
(2004) presentation of a conversation analytic
perspective on language classroom interaction.
In fact, in presenting his perspective, Seedhouse
drew heavily on Kasper and van Lier’s early frame-
works, arguing that the organization of CA repair,
and, specifically, the definition of the trouble, is
“primarily related to pedagogical focus” (p. 143).
Excerpt 12 is an example of what Seedhouse
(2004) claimed to be CA repair in a pedagogically
oriented interaction. According to Seedhouse,
the teacher’s pedagogical focus is on getting the
students to produce a chain of specific linguistic
items. Seedhouse was right to note the pedagog-
ical focus of the interaction. He was wrong, how-
ever, in interpreting the teacher’s actions in lines
4 and 6 as OIR, undertaken “until L produces
exactly the targeted string of linguistic forms in
Line 7” (p. 144). What these actions are doing is
520
instructional correction, as part of the larger in-
structional IRF sequence of action. We see that
the IRF sequence begins in lines 1 and 2 of the
excerpt, with a known-answer question by the
teacher. This action projects and, as expected,
is followed by a student response in line 3. The
response, in turn, projects the third turn of the
sequence (feedback), which the teacher provides
in line 4 and again in line 6, with prompts to
help the student provide the expected correct re-
sponse; the student finally does so in line 7.
To be OIR, as claimed by Seedhouse (2004), the
teacher’s actions would have to display some trou-
ble with hearing or understanding the prior stu-
dent turns. Its insertion into the sequence would
then put the projected next turn on hold until the
trouble was handled. In the case of the IRF, the
action projected by a student response is teacher
feedback. However, in this excerpt, there is no
demonstrated misunderstanding or mishearing
by the teacher of what the student said in lines 3
and 5. Nor do the participants at any time stop the
IRF to deal with an unanticipated trouble. Rather,
they proceed together in the three-part sequence
of action as expected, moving from teacher ini-
tiation to student response to teacher feedback,
with no apparent disfluency or uncertainty.
A similar misinterpretation appears in Excerpt
13, which comes from Jung’s (1999) study inves-
tigating the interaction of a university-level ESL
class. According to Jung, the excerpt is part of a
larger instructional sequence of action in which
EXCERPT 124
(Seedhouse, 2004, p. 144)
1 T: right, the cup is on top of the box, ((T moves cup))
2 now, where is the cup?
3 L: in the box.
4 T: the cup is (.)?
5 L: in the box
6 T: the cup is in (.)?
7 L: the cup is in the box.
8 T: right, very good, the cup is in the box.
EXCERPT 13
(Jung, 1999, p. 163)
1 L5: Fish.
2 T: A:lright. We usually divide fish into a different category, but the::
((shifting her gaze from L5 to the whole class)) what’s another
popular meat in the United States?
3 LL: E::rr, e::r
4 T: ((making a pig sound))
5 L7: Pork, pork
6 L8: Turkey, turkey
7 T: Ok, pork. Ok, pork is another popular meat.
The Modern Language Journal 91 (2007)
the teacher is asking the students to list different
types of meat. Like Seedhouse (2004), however,
Jung misinterpreted the teacher action in line 2
as an OIR that marks the student turn in line 1 as
containing a trouble source. A closer look reveals
that the teacher’s turn does not stop the progres-
sion of talk to address a problem in the hearing
or understanding of what the student said, which
is what it should do if it were an OIR. In fact,
the teacher’s turn in line 2 begins with a clear ac-
knowledgment of having heard and understood
the student response. The problem appears to
be, instead, with the student’s misunderstanding
of the distinction between fish and meat. Such
problems of conceptual understanding are quite
different from the problems that CA repair ad-
dresses (Schegloff et al., 2002). They are, however,
a central focus of the IRF instructional practice.
Here, we see the teacher handle the problem of
the incorrect student response by giving a brief ex-
planation, “We usually divide fish into a different
category” as feedback, and begin another round
of IRF with the question “What’s another popular
meat in the United States?” placing stress on the
word meat. After the teacher provides a prompt
of pig sounds in line 4, the sought-after response
pork, a kind of meat, is finally given in line 5, and,
through the teacher’s repetition of the word with
falling intonation, it is acknowledged as correct in
line 7.
Excerpt 14 is another example in which instruc-
tional correction is mistakenly treated as a type of
Joan Kelly Hall
CA repair. The distinction, here, however, is more
subtle. The excerpt comes from a study by Koshik
(2002) in which she examined the use of a partic-
ular corrective device—prompts, or, as Koshik re-
ferred to them, decidedly incomplete utterances
(DIUs)—which are used by a teacher to elicit stu-
dent self-correction of written language errors in
one-on-one L2 writing conferences. Koshik noted
the pedagogical focus of the DIUs. However, in
her interpretation of one sequence of action, she
drew on CA repair rather than instructional cor-
rection to explain the teacher’s actions in elicit-
ing the student response. Prior to the exchange
in Excerpt 14, the teacher had been attempting
to prompt identification and self-correction of a
written error by the student with a series of hints.
The excerpt begins with the teacher providing a
DIU as a hint to the location of the error, which,
until this point, the student has been unable to
identify. The sequence in question occurs in lines
46 through 49 in which the teacher, while gestur-
ing, reads the text, stressing the problematic word
that, and ends with a rising intonation. According
to Koshik, this “partial repeat with upward intona-
tion” (p. 286) is a type of other-initiated CA repair
that can be heard as harbinger of disagreement.
This interpretation highlights two misunder-
standings of the organization of OIRs. First, as
explained earlier, OIRs do not occur as regular
turns in a current sequence of action. Instead,
they are part of another type of sequence, one
that is inserted into the ongoing course of action,
to halt the projected next turn so that participants
can deal with problems in hearing or understand-
ing the immediately preceding turn. A trouble
source itself, such as a student error, “is not se-
quentially implicative of the repair initiation” and
so “does not make anything relevant next, even
though the repair initiation locates it as its source”
(Schegloff, 2007, p. 218). Rather, troubles in talk
are invoked retrospectively by OIRs. And when
EXCERPT 14
(Koshik, 2002, p. 285)
44 TT: ok.
45 (0.2)
46 →>> !tha:n
47 ((TT gestures toward point in text))
48 (1.8) ((TT holds gesture; TT and SA eyegaze on text))
49 TT: →> that? ↑of adolf hitler↑
50 (0.5) ((TT and SA both gaze at text))
51 SA: → oh just than
52 TT: tha ⌈ n?=right.goo ⌈ d.tha:n⌉ adolf=
⌊◦ ⌊◦
53 SA: yeah ( )⌋
54 TT: =Hitler. right.uh huh?
521
they are, the course of action is stopped until the
trouble source is handled. If the teacher action
displayed in lines 46 through 49 were indeed a
type of CA repair, we would expect to see the
progress of the pedagogical practice of earmark-
ing and correcting student errors stopped until
the trouble source was addressed. However, ear-
marking errors and dealing with them via instruc-
tional correction is exactly what the main course
of action is doing.
Second, it is true, as Koshik (2002) claimed,
that, in invoking trouble in hearing or under-
standing something in a prior turn, an OIR can
act as a predisagreement. As Schegloff (2007) ex-
plained, using an OIR to treat something as a
problem in hearing or understanding allows par-
ticipants to evade “overt disagreement by provid-
ing an opportunity for the other to back away
from that which is to be disagreed” (p. 159).
However, treating the teacher action as this type
of CA repair ignores the empirical fact that the
teacher action does not signal any potential con-
flict with what is to come but, instead, continues
the instructional work that both the teacher and
student have been doing up until this point. In
this turn, the teacher’s oral reading of the stu-
dent’s written work by repeating the error with
rising intonation points precisely to the student
error-to-be-corrected (see Hellermann, 2003),
and thus marks it as instance of a corrective de-
vice used in the IRF. With the student production
of the sought-after, correct linguistic item, pro-
jected by the teacher action, the student displays
an orientation to the instructional nature of the
teacher’s action.
A final example in which instructional correc-
tion and CA correction as a type of CA repair
are conflated appears in Excerpt 15, which comes
from Liebscher and Dailey-O’Cain’s (2003) study
of an advanced FL German classroom. Accord-
ing to Liebscher and Dailey-O’Cain, the teacher
522
EXCERPT 155
(Liebscher & Dailey-O’Cain, 2003, p. 383)
S6: es ist ähm (.)SYSTEM [orientiert?
It is um (.) system- [oriented?
[ knowledge.
→TR: [sysTEM orient[tiert
[system – orient[ted
[ such, we should expect to find (and we do) CA
S6: [sysTEM
TR: OKAY was bedeutet das
Okay what does that mean
initiated repair in the CA sense in response to a
student’s use of the English pronunciation of a
word in a stretch of talk that is otherwise in Ger-
man. If it were indeed an OIR, it would have to
signal some difficulty on the part of the teacher
in hearing or understanding the prior turn. How-
ever, the difficulty appears to occur in the stu-
dent’s turn, rather than in the teacher’s turn. The
student’s use of rising intonation marks the turn
as tentatively given, serving to “guess what the
teacher has in mind” (Heritage, 2004, p. 125),
and projects a next turn that gives feedback on
the guess. This feedback, in fact, occurs with the
teacher’s provision of the requested instructional
correction on the student’s pronunciation in the
line marked with an arrow, and with her positive
assessment of the student’s corrected pronuncia-
tion in the final line.
On a positive note, such CA-based analyses of
classroom interaction are useful in that they add
to what we have learned about the instructional
practice of IRF and its instructional correction
component from interactional and discourse an-
alytic research, in two ways. First, they further
confirm the ubiquity of this instructional practice
across language classrooms, and second, they al-
low us to see its more finely grained architectural
details. Their usefulness, however, is overshad-
owed by the confusion they engender by treat-
ing the instructional practice and its correction
component, in particular, as a variation of the CA
practice of repair. Perhaps most significantly, con-
flating the two practices conceals the distinct and
important work that each one does. As noted ear-
lier, the IRF is a specialized sequence of action
for instruction, with instructional correction be-
ing a key component, and thus, central to the
work of teaching and learning. In language class-
rooms, they serve specifically to build students’
language knowledge by continually assessing and
correcting their language production. In their
role as expert language knowers, teachers lead
The Modern Language Journal 91 (2007)
students in this task through the IRF. As we saw in
the earlier excerpts, learners come to the prac-
tice with a shared understanding of their role
as learners, and, together with the teacher, ori-
ent to the task of producing correct language
The central concern of CA repair is with restor-
ing understanding between parties in talk. As
repair practices occurring regularly in classrooms
just as they do outside the classroom for the same
purpose, in other words, to deal with misunder-
standings, mishearings, or an inability to hear
what was just said. Excerpt 16, also taken from
Liebscher and Dailey-O’Cain (2003), is a case in
point. Here, the teacher appears to have trou-
ble hearing S8’s first turn. In order for the in-
structional task to continue, the teacher and stu-
dents must establish a shared understanding of
what is being discussed, and the teacher there-
fore initiates a repair (OIR) with her utterance
“I didn’t hear that very well. Sorry.” This OIR
leads to S8’s self-repair in a reformulation of the
question. Although data are not provided to dis-
play what happens next, we can speculate that
the completed repair allows the teacher and stu-
dent to get back to the task at hand. Such un-
derstanding is a prerequisite for learning, for, as
Macbeth (2004) rightly pointed out, achievement
of instruction can occur “only in the presence
of the achievement of common understanding”
(p. 728).
In sum, instructional correction and CA repair
do distinct kinds of work in classroom interaction
and therefore are more appropriately understood
as “co-operating organizations” (Macbeth, 2004,
p. 723), both of which are necessary to the ac-
complishment of learning in classrooms. Instruc-
tional correction is part of the IRF, a three-part
sequence of action specialized for pedagogy. In
contrast, CA repair and CA correction are in-
teractional resources available to teachers and
EXCERPT 16
(Liebscher & Dailey-O’Cain, 2003, p. 386)
S8: WHAT ABOUT (.) IF THE PEOPLE THEM-
SELVES LIKE FROM DIFFERENT COUNTRIES
FROM DIFFERENT CULTURES
WOULD THEY UNDERSTAND IT?
→TR: I DIDN’T HEAR THAT VERY WELL. SORRY
S8: IF SOME PEOPLE ARE FROM DIFFERENT
COUNTRIES WOULD THEY KNOW-WOULD
THEY-LIKE-FROM DIFFERENT-OR A
DIFFERENT CULTURE? WOULD THEY
UNDERSTAND IT?
Joan Kelly Hall
students, and anyone else for that matter, to
deal with troubles in speaking and hearing that
have the potential to threaten their mutual un-
derstanding of the interactional work they do
together. For teachers and students working to-
gether in classrooms, these troubles include diffi-
culties understanding the sequence organization
of the IRF itself (Macbeth, 2004). Without such
a tool for dealing with troubles in talk, it would
be difficult for teachers and students to do the in-
structional work that brings them to the classroom
in the first place.
CONCLUSIONS
Studies using CA to examine language class-
rooms have drawn attention to its promise as a
tool for enriching our understanding of the intri-
cacies of classroom interaction. At the same time,
they have made apparent, however unwittingly,
the conceptual and analytic difficulties that can
arise when moving to different theoretical terri-
tories where similar appearing terms are used.
As we have seen, although the words repair and
correction are important terms in both CA and
SLA, their conceptual histories in their respec-
tive theoretical worlds are quite different. For CA
to have “long-term viability” (Markee & Kasper,
2004, p. 496) in the study of SLA, researchers us-
ing CA tools need to be mindful of such concep-
tual distinctions. Acknowledging their conceptual
distinctiveness alone, however, does not mean that
they will be easy to distinguish empirically. For,
as Schegloff noted (2007, cited in Wong & Ol-
sher, 2000), given the classroom’s central concern
with learning, it can be difficult to distinguish
between the official activities of understanding
and correcting that are central to learning and
the problems of repair that arise in the course of
learning. In language classrooms, where language
is simultaneously the tool of instruction and the
object of pedagogical attention, the analytic pro-
cess of “discriminating the main trajectory of the
interaction from temporary suspension of it for
repair” can be especially difficult as “not every
correction is repair , not every problem in under-
standing implicates the operations of repair for
its solution” (Schegloff et al., 2002, pp. 7–8).6 Al-
though the work may be difficult, continuing to
use the tools of CA to study SLA is vital for dis-
cerning the distinctive structures of the various
constellations of classroom interactional practices
in particular learning contexts and how individ-
ual learners’ involvement in them is constituted.
Findings from such research will surely contribute
523
to a more robust understanding of the enterprise
of classroom-based language learning.
NOTES
1 Thanks to Editor Sally Magnan and the journal’s
anonymous reviewers for their suggestions for improve-
ment. I am also grateful to Johannes Wagner for his
careful and well-directed comments.
2 Hellermann used 25 hours of data for the 2003 study
and over 30 hours of data for the 2005 study.
3 To ensure maximum clarity in the discussion that
follows, I use the terms CA repair and CA correction to
refer to the CA resources, and instructional repair and
instructional correction to refer to the instructional prac-
tice components.
4 Like this excerpt, which originally appeared in John-
son (1995, p. 10), most of the excerpts in Seedhouse
(2004) are taken from other sources.
5 While it appears that some lines of text are not
aligned correctly, the excerpt is reproduced here as it
appears in the published article. The conventions in-
clude italics for utterances in German and SMALL CAPS
for utterances in English. English glosses of the German
are in plain type beneath the German text.
6 In stressing the difficulty in teasing apart the em-
pirical distinctions between these two lines of activity
in language classroom data, Schegloff goes on to state,
“I don’t think these problems are insoluble, but they
underscore that problems of repair are very different
kinds of problems than people who wanted to work in
that area may have had in mind to work on” (Wong &
Olsher, pp. 122–123).
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