Applied Linguistics 2014: 35/2: 145–167 ß Oxford University Press 2013

doi:10.1093/applin/amt006 Advance Access published on 2 May 2013

The Roles of Third-Turn Repeats in Two L2

Classroom Interactional Contexts

YUJONG PARK
English Language and Literature Department, College of Liberal Arts,
Sungkyunkwan University, Sungkyunkwan-Ro 25-2, Jongno-Gu, Seoul, Korea
E-mail: yujpark@skku.edu

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This study provides an empirically based contribution to the growing body of
research using conversation analysis as a methodical tool for analysing functions
of action types through interaction in L2 classroom settings. Using data from
various L2 classrooms in ESL and EFL contexts, it is argued that the role
of repeats differ depending on the pedagogical focus of the interaction, specific-
ally between meaning-and-fluency contexts and form-and-accuracy contexts
(Seedhouse, 2004). Repeats in meaning and fluency contexts are used to
invoke an account of a previous response by a student without overtly display-
ing it as problematic in any way; whereby in form-and-accuracy contexts,
third-turn repeats confirm the response as being a correct one by sustaining
an orientation to the instructional activity that the participants are engaged
in. It is suggested that in classes in which the goal is to help students produce
language that is authentic and resembles real-time interaction, repeats in the
third turn may provide an effective tool for facilitating talk.

INTRODUCTION
In this article, a common event observed in L2 classroom interactions, namely,
repeats of other people’s turns by participants, is analysed using the method-
ology of conversation analysis (CA) to contribute to an empirically grounded
theory of second language talk and learning (Markee 2000; Wong 2000;
Cazden 2001; Seedhouse 2004; Kasper 2006; Pekarek Doehler 2010). Two
types of repeats are identified from close analysis of videotaped L2 classroom
interaction to reveal how the continuation-invoking characteristic of third-
turn teacher repeats may create opportunity for student learning through au-
thentic language usage that is also found in ordinary conversational practise.
Past research has supported the pervasive presence of repetition in classroom
interaction and the important role it plays in L2 development (Chaudron 1988;
Cook 1994; Tomlin 1994; Gass et al. 1998; Duff 2000; Hellerman 2003; Rydland
and Aukrust 2005; Piirainen-Marsh and Tainio 2009) by expanding the ana-
lysis of the many ways that repetition functions in interactions across a wide
range of educational settings. By using the term ‘revoicing’, repeats have also
been analysed as a resource for teacher control that may include students in
the process of intellectual socialization in large-group classroom discussions
146 THE ROLES OF THIRD-TURN REPEATS

(O’Connor and Michaels 1993). The goal of this study is to develop an account
of action grounded in the observable details of conduct in L2 classroom set-
tings, which can be juxtaposed to the abstract and theoretical accounts of past
and current work, accounts which were grounded in conceptual and norma-
tive consideration. The following two excerpts exemplify the focal
phenomenon.
Excerpt 1. SN_middle school
01 T: What did you feel after you read this passage.
02 S3: Uh his parents i::s
03 S4: lia[r

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04 S3: [lia(hh)r. hhh
05 T: His parents are liars. hh hhe
06 S4: They’re not good.
07 T: Sometimes parents need to be a liar.
08 S3: Not good.
09 T: ! Not good.
10 S3: Parents must be honest.
11 T: Okay. Parents should be honest. Yeah you’re right.

Excerpt 2. SDV_1305
01 T: Here since. since can be replaced with?
02 S1: Because.
03 T: ! Because. Ve::ry good. Okay.
The repeats (arrowed turns) in both Excerpts 1 and 2 are associated with dis-
tinctive sequential environments that co-exist in the language learning class-
room. As will be shown in later analyses, teachers and students determine the
relevance of the task context by acting on the repeat in differing ways when
compared with other third-turn receipt objects, such as ‘okay’ or types of as-
sessments. The phenomena can also be explained by the different epistemic
status of the participants, in which ‘persons recognize one another to be more
or less knowledgeable concerning some domain of knowledge as a more or less
settled matter or fact’ (Heritage 2012: 32), as the initial questions (at line 1)
lead to distinctive sequences after the third-turn repeat. The focus of this article
is on repeats occurring in the third turn (arrowed turns above) of the three-
part IRF (initiation–response–feedback) exchange (Sinclair and Coulthard
1975). Although previous literature has demonstrated the complexity of the
third-turn (the feedback turn) position (Nassaji and Wells 2000; Cazden 2001)
and its significance in the language classroom (Hall 1998), few studies have
investigated how repetition actions are implicated in this position. The present
article implements a procedural approach using conversation analysis to exam-
ine the actions served by third-turn repeats in different L2 classroom contexts,
focusing on the sequential production of repeats, as well as the interpretive
choices and methods that are enacted in the third position, specifically in
relation to the first turn question. Investigating the third-turn repeat via
 Y. PARK 147

this analytic route could contribute to second language acquisition studies

by providing an empirical account of the learning process in real time. This
study could also contribute to the study of repetition that has largely been
conducted by interactional sociolinguists (Schegloff 1997; Tannen 2007)
who were concerned with ordinary conversations between native speakers
of a language by showing how there is not a one-to-one relationship
between structure and function. An account of ‘why’ and ‘how’ the different
orientation to responding to these repeats will also be explained in relation
to the notion of territories of knowledge or epistemic domains located in the
initial question asked (Heritage 2012). Other contributions of this study to

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the body of research on language learning will be detailed in the following
sections.

REPETITION AND LANGUAGE LEARNING

Recent studies by applied linguists and language learning researchers have
been aimed at understanding language learning and assessing competence
by examining learners’ ability to use the language being learned for social
practises, often in real-world contexts. From this perspective, a learner’s goal
or target for study might be considered some degree of interactional rather
than purely grammatical competence (Hall 1995; Young 1999; Markee 2000;
Hellerman 2006; Hall et al. 2011). Conversation analysis, in particular, has
been noted as a method that can contribute to understanding learning, as it
could exemplify how language is used and learned through social interaction
(Seedhouse 2004; Hellerman 2006, 2008; Pekarek Doehler 2010).
Studies of teacher–student interactions in language learning contexts
(Chaudron 1988; O’Connor and Michaels 1993; Duff 2000; Wong 2000;
Hellerman 2003) have reported certain functions of repeats as beneficial to
learning. These studies showed that repeats by a teacher of a student’s utter-
ance can draw students’ attention to key concepts or linguistic forms, revoice a
student’s contribution, correct it, or affirm its validity and scaffold student
learning. Interest in repetition practises and language learning first developed
from studies that treated repetition in caregiver and child speech as an import-
ant variable for first language acquisition. Research focusing on child language
learning and socialization analysed the functions and contributions of repeti-
tion in these interactions (Keenan 1977; Schieffelin and Ochs 1986; Schieffelin
1990; Brown 2000). Brown (2000) showed that Tzeltal children acquire verb
roots through a practise called ‘dialogic repetition’, that is, repetition of all or
most of the propositions found in adult speech in the immediately previous
turn. Halliday and Hasan (1976: 214–15) analysed repeats as one example of
‘question rejoinders’, which have the function of querying a preceding state-
ment or command or eliciting supplementary information about it. In his study
of classroom interaction, Seedhouse (2004) described the function of one type
of repeat, that is, repeating the learner’s erroneous utterance with a rising
148 THE ROLES OF THIRD-TURN REPEATS

intonation, as a strategy for conducting repair without using direct negative

evaluation. The following is a typical example.
Excerpt 3. Seedhouse 2004, 166 (line number has been modified)
01 L1: er and I: I am very good person,
02 and [((laughs))] and give she another one
03 LL: [((laugh))]
04 T: ! give she?
05 L1: (.) give her another one.
Here, the teacher’s repeat of L1’s turn in rising intonation (line 4: ‘give she?’)

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prompts the learner to revise the erroneous part of the previous turn (line 2:
‘give she another one’) into a linguistically correct form (line 4: ‘give her
another one’). Other studies also confirmed the usefulness of repeats in L2
language classrooms as an indirect method for correcting students’ erroneous
productions or grammatical mistakes (Larson-Freeman 2000).1
Repeat as a practise for initiating other sequential actions is also pervasive in
classroom discourse. Repeats can offer genuine opportunities for student pro-
duction and provide effective comprehension (Tannen 2007); therefore, repe-
tition can be a potentially useful tool for second language acquisition. Duff
(2000: 135) stated that for learners, the academic and cognitive benefits of
repetition are that they can hear multiple occurrences of a potentially prob-
lematic term and practise articulating the term. Kasper and Ross (2004)
analysed repeats as a source of miscommunication in the Language
Proficiency Interview. As such, conceptual categories may help to identify
teachers’ repeats as formal constructs; yet, they do not account for the pro-
cesses through which repeats are made intelligible by those who use them in
actual interaction and for what they accomplish in doing so. It would, there-
fore, be informative to investigate the production of repeats in their activity
contexts of real-time classroom interactions to reveal its pedagogical value.

REPEATS IN THE THIRD POSITION

Repeats are an optional choice made by the teacher, and they are a resource
used among a range of practises (e.g. evaluative remarks, continuers, and ac-
knowledgements also commonly occur in the third position) in which each
particular practise can be carried out through other means. It is, therefore,
meaningful to investigate why repeats are used to perform a certain action
in that particular position (Schegloff and Sacks 1973). Because repeats can be
produced through different forms in various locations, it is important to define
the scope of ‘repetition’ used in this article. Repetitions with small or large
variations are a common phenomenon and have been studied under the titles
‘recycling’, ‘transformation’, ‘recasts’, ‘revoicing’, and ‘deconstruction’
(O’Connor and Michaels 1993; Brown 2000; Anward 2005; Tannen 2007).
Repeats also vary in the prosodic cues used with them (e.g. Excerpt 15). For
example, Hellerman (2003) demonstrated how teachers repeat student
 Y. PARK 149

responses with a different set of prosodic cues to mark a student response as

less than complete and irrelevant or as a positive assessment at the end of a
particular IRF exchange. The use of the term ‘repeat’ or ‘repetition’ in this
article allows for transformation in ellipsis, tense shift, speaker change, and
minor paraphrases, as well as pronunciation shifts of its target that are placed
in the third turn of an IRF sequence. These third-turn repeats can be con-
trasted with the partial repeats presented by Schegloff et al. (1977: 367–8),
which demonstrate difficulties in hearing or understanding a previous turn
(e.g. ‘Well, I’m working through the Amfat Corporation’.—‘The who?’).
Another type of repeat that needs to be distinguished is repeated turns that

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end with a rising intonation (Seedhouse 2004: 166). Third-turn repeats with a
rising intonation frequently lead to other-initiated self-repair as we have seen
earlier in the text in Excerpt 3.
What, then, are the basic characteristics of the sequences in which the re-
peats in question occur? A reconsideration of Excerpts 1 and 2 leads to the
following observations: first, these repeats are located in the third position after
a question–answer sequence; secondly, they are both taken from a teacher-
fronted classroom. For example, in Excerpt 1, students are engaged in a com-
prehension activity led by the teacher after reading a text, and in Excerpt 2, the
teacher is checking students’ understanding of the word ‘since’. Finally, both
repeats are produced through a final downward intonation (indicated by the
period). In summary, notwithstanding the existence of the wide range of repe-
tition practises found in interactions, this study analyses a specific context in
which repetitions are produced, namely, repetitions produced in the third turn
after a second pair part response to a first pair part question. The reasons for
limiting the context of the study in this manner are the following: (i) teachers’
repeats are frequently observed in this sequential location (van Lier 1996); and
(ii) the significance of this location for language learning has been noted in
previous studies (Hall 1998; Nassaji and Wells 2000; Lee 2007). The third turn
after the teacher-initiated question and student reply is normally reserved for
the teacher who comments on the adequacy of the reply in this turn (Mehan
1979). The sequence type in which the repetition occurs can be initially sche-
matized as follows:
1 Teacher: Question turn
2 Student: Response turn
3 Teacher: ! Repeat of 2
4 Student/teacher: Further talk

This article examines how the participants use and understand the third-turn
repeat (!) by focusing on what occurs in the following turn (4). From a
sequential perspective, it is fruitful to analyse what follows the third turn be-
cause the fourth turn demonstrates how students made sense of the preceding
turn. Consequently, the intelligibility of teachers’ repeats in the third turn is
much contingent on the real-time interpretive work of the students.
150 THE ROLES OF THIRD-TURN REPEATS

An empirical analysis of sequences that contain repeating actions revealed

the relevance of two classroom task environments, that is, meaning-and-flu-
ency contexts and form-and-accuracy contexts, in the different types of actions
associated with repeats; the pedagogical focus influences the type and purpose
of questions that teachers ask which in turn brings different meanings to the
repeat turn in its sequential location. In these contexts, the teacher’s initiating
questions either recognize the student to be more or less knowledgeable con-
cerning some domain of information. It should be emphasized that classroom
discourse cannot be reduced to these two contexts; the analytic distinction
revealed itself in the course of analysing the data and proved to be a relevant

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distinction of context to the participants who were engaged in the talk. The
distinction shows how institutional talk is different from ordinary conversation
in that the former is associated with specified goals (e.g. L2 learning)
(Seedhouse 2004). These two categories proved to be representative of the
cases of repeats in the database for this analysis and accounted for most of
the cases in which third-turn repetition occurred.

DATA AND METHODOLOGY

The data for the present study are drawn from a variety of video recordings and
transcripts of interactions between teachers and their students in L2 classrooms
collected between 2006 and 2009. The data include 10 h of discourse in ESL/
EFL classrooms. Each class had between 6 and 25 students present, and each
teacher had at least five years of classroom teaching experience. The data were
obtained from one digital video recording and, depending on the classroom
size, several audio recorders. The camera recorded the classroom interaction
from the back of the class, and one to three audio recorders were placed on
individual students’ desks to ensure that most of the student talk in the class-
room could be recorded. Repetition was identified through observation of the
data, and it was found to be both frequent and consequential for the inter-
action. Examples are also drawn from past conversation analytic studies for
which transcripts are available for use.
The ESL and EFL classroom lessons collected for this study had different
characteristics that can be noted. First, the ESL classes included many pair
and group tasks led by students, whereas the EFL classes proceeded mostly
through teacher-led lectures. Secondly, the age of students and the goal of L2
learning differed between these two contexts. Although the videotaped ESL
classrooms consisted of college- and post–college-level students in their 20s
and 30s who were learning English to pass a university oral proficiency
exam and fulfil the requirements for their university studies in USA, EFL class-
rooms consisted of middle and high school students who were learning English
as part of their national curriculum in Korea. Recitation sequences (strings of
three-turn sequences in which repetition by the teachers in the third turn is
often used as an evaluation tool) were more frequently observed in EFL class-
rooms when compared with ESL classrooms. However, both classrooms
 Y. PARK 151

contained activities and practises that are commonly found in L2 learning

classrooms (e.g. group tasks, drilling, and reciting activities), and both contexts
revealed an orientation to institutional goals and roles, including institutiona-
lized interactional asymmetries associated with these roles (Drew and Heritage
1992). Therefore, when analysing the data, a distinction between these classes
was not made unless it became relevant to understand the actions of repeats.
The two context types, namely, form-and-accuracy and meaning-and-fluency
contexts, were defined by analysing the function of repeats and their sequen-
tial environment in ESL and EFL classrooms alike.
Collected materials were transcribed according to the conventions of con-

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versation analysis developed by Gail Jefferson (Atkinson and Heritage 1984).
In the following section, an examination of empirical sequences of repeats that
teachers use to expand a sequence after the second pair part response is
provided.

THIRD-TURN REPEATS IN TWO CONTEXTS

The analysis of repeats in the third turn revealed two different sequential
consequences in the fourth turn. Further analysis of these contexts showed
that third-turn repeats were located in two different contexts of teaching and
learning: learning language forms and structure versus engaging in meaningful
conversation. The two task contexts happened to overlap with the categories,
namely, form-and-accuracy and meaning-and-fluency contexts, provided by
Seedhouse (2004), and this intersection led to the categorical terms used in this
article. Again, the justifications for these two task contexts were derived from
the data and were not in any sense defined a priori.

Third-turn repeats in meaning-and-fluency contexts

In an L2 classroom, repeats regularly occur in the third turn in response to a
student’s answer to a previous question. Whether it is a small-circle conver-
sation practise, an informal one-on-one session, or a whole-class participation
framework, teachers occasionally use questions that ask for information that
the teacher does not know (classified as ‘referential questions’ by Long and
Sato 1983). Through these questions teachers position themselves in a rela-
tively unknowing position relative to the student who responds, which initi-
ates sequences by inviting information from the student. Teacher repeats in
the third turn can be found after student responses to these questions. Here,
analysis revealed that they act as a request for an account concerning the
previous response that leads to further talk from the student.
The following segment from an ESL classroom illustrates the context in
which repeats that lead to further talk from students are found. Students are
engaged in a small group interaction in which the teacher (T) is asking four
students in turn about their life in Los Angeles. The pedagogical focus is on
creating meaning and promoting fluency rather than on language forms or
152 THE ROLES OF THIRD-TURN REPEATS

grammar. In this exchange, the teacher and students are seated in a circle; the
teacher’s body posture and gaze are oriented towards S1, making him the
targeted next speaker.
Excerpt 4. NS-NNS
08 T: 1! you’re having a good time?
09 (0.2) ((T’s gaze is towards S1))
10 T: 1! in LA?
11 S1:2! not so much(hh). ((laughing voice))
12 T: 3! not [so much. heh
13 S2/S3: [hhehheh

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14 S1: yeah(hh). actually (.)
15 I understand why he ((points to S2)) talk about UCLA because
16 S2: hha[hhh
17 S1: [you know(hh)
18 in my case also(hhh)I think I never go(hh) outside UCLA(h)
19 T/S3: hahahhah
The question at line 08 initiates a sequence, that is, it is the first pair part of
an adjacency pair, and it introduces a new topic into the talk. The teacher’s
question is divided into two turns: ‘you’re having a good time?’ and ‘in LA?’
(lines 08 and 10). Her first question fails to receive an immediate response,
and she narrows down the scope of the question by adding ‘in LA?’ possibly
making it easier for S1 to answer. The teacher’s turns select S1 as the next
speaker and select answering the question as a relevant next action. In line
11, S1 provides a negative response (‘not so much’) that is gradually infil-
trated by laughter. The third-turn repeat that follows at line 12 is embedded
in laughter, and other students join in. The teacher’s repeat turn can be
interpreted in different ways by the student. It can be understood as a se-
quence closing third that confirms the response (Schegloff 2007) or as a
request for further explanation. The student displays in his next turn that
he understood the teacher’s repeat as a request. S1 replies with a resumptive
‘yeah(hh)’ and a continuing ‘actually’. In the sense that it invokes a re-
sponse, the repeat can be interpreted as composing the first pair part of an
adjacency pair. The repeat prompts further talk from S1, who treats it as
proposing that the informing should continue, and that he should explain
what has been left unstated. He proceeds to explain why he is not enjoying
LA so much. The utterance following the repeat specifies the way in which
the repeat was heard, namely, it treats the response as unfinished or as
topicalized for continuation. The repeat here aligns with the item as story-
able, whereas the correction-oriented repeats (such as the interaction seen in
Excerpt 3) treat the talk as grammatically or structurally problematic. When
S1 produces a turn after the repeat, the talk sustains a topical focus on the
previous answer about life at school in Los Angeles.
Here, there is another example of the deployment of repeats as a practise for
requesting further talk by the respondent (student). The following excerpt was
 Y. PARK 153

taken from a small group interaction in an EFL class of 20 students. The

teacher is not part of the interaction that occurs here and is attending to an-
other group. Three students are talking about their plans for summer vacation.
The pedagogical focus at the moment is on practising using language to pro-
mote fluency by engaging in a free talking task.
Excerpt 5. KU-summer
13 S1: =So what’s yo::ur plan. ((turns toward S2))
14 S2: ^Oh I’ll uh do exercise very hard for diet and health.
15 S1: 1! What kind of- weighting? weighting?
16 S2: 2! Oh yes, weighting. I want to make muscle.

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17 S1: 3! muscle.
18 S2: Yeah, because uh I will join K**** dance=
19 S3: =He’s ly[ing.
20 S2: [so I want to make body and doing that.
21 If I had a time- if I have a time I will go dance school. also
22 S1: mmmm.
23 (0.8)
24 S2: Yeah. How about you? What’s your plan. ((points toward S1))
In line 13, S1 turns to S2 and asks about his plans for the summer. This
utterance makes relevant a response in the next turn. S2 announces that he
will be exercising hard (line 14). After this response, S1 further asks about the
type of exercise that S2 will be doing (‘what kind of-’) but aborts the articu-
lation mid-turn and thereby prevents the statement from reaching possible
completion. In its place, he produces a question that includes a candidate
answer (‘weighting?’). S2 confirms this guess with a ‘yes’ token and provides
a reason why he will be doing weight lifting, that is, ‘to make muscle’ (line 16).
This response is followed by a repeat of the word ‘muscle’ by the questioner.
This free-standing repeat has a falling final contour that is associated with
declarative questions. Hellerman (2003) noted that, in classroom interactions,
a falling contour in the teacher’s feedback and a mid-pitch level is a closing
prosody that indicates the achievement of mutual understanding and that no
further negotiation is necessary. In Excerpts 4 and 5, participants do not treat a
falling contour as closing-relevant, but rather further talk follows the repeat,
which is similar to the use of repetition in the third position in everyday con-
versation to indicate trouble of some kind (Hellerman 2003: 100). Because
Excerpts 4 and 5 are oriented towards eliciting a story and the story-eliciting
response is common in this type of talk, within the context of encouraging an
ongoing telling or report of some sort, the interaction closely resembles ordin-
ary talk. We can infer that the interactional import of third-turn repeats with a
falling contour would be similar in these classroom task contexts. In Excerpt 5,
the repeat at line 17 targets the possible implications of the recipient’s re-
sponse. S2’s obsession with losing weight and building muscles may be unclear
to other students. The repeat may be thus targeted at clarifying this issue by
indicating the need for further explanation in topicalizing the word ‘muscle’.
154 THE ROLES OF THIRD-TURN REPEATS

The repeat is also comparable with a b-event inquiry in English: a declarative

turn construction asking for information or experiences that are primarily
known to the recipient (Labov and Franshel 1977; Heritage and Roth 1995).
When S1’s question (1!) occupies an unknowing epistemic status relative to
S2, the repeat treats the information provided by S2 as insufficient and the
repeat solicits additional information (leading to sequence expansion). S2 ori-
ents to the repeat by S1 as an invitation for further talk and develops an
elaborated response composed of two parts. Retrospectively treating the
repeat as a question and expressing the speaker’s acceptance of the request,
the first part reconfirms the repeat as being correct (‘yeah’). After ‘yeah’, the

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second part of the turn contains an account of why he needs to build muscles,
namely, to join the university dance club.
Examination of third-turn repeats that lead to further talk from the students
invariably turned out to be taken from classroom contexts that focused on
promoting meaning-and-fluency by expressing personal meaning rather
than focusing on linguistic forms or accuracy. The teacher has less control
over the interactions, and the pedagogical aim of these contexts is to maximize
the opportunities for interaction presented by the classroom environment and
the classroom speech community itself (Seedhouse 2004: 149). The more open
participation structure allowed by interactions in meaning-and-fluency con-
texts closely resembles talk in conversational settings outside of the classroom.
In the following, two examples that contain the type of repeats we examined
earlier in the text are taken from ordinary conversation for comparison. The
repeat provides a challenge to the truthfulness and seriousness of the turn that
the repeat targeted, and it makes relevant an account by the respondent in the
next turn.
Excerpt 6. Upholstery shop (from Schegloff 1996: 178–9)
01 Mike: W’ll what are yer religious beliefs.
02 Vic: Uh, (0.7) S’preme being.
03 Mike: ! Supreme being.
04 Vic: uh yeah I get confused when I say supreme being and I::

Excerpt 7. Discussion of the Whorfian hypothesis (from Tannen 2007: 68)

01 Deborah: You know who else talks about that?
02 Did you ever read R. D. Laing?
03 The divided self?
04 Chad: Yeah. But I don’t ().
05 Deborah: He talks about that too.
06 Chad: ! He talks about it too.
07 Deborah: Like he says that
08 he says that America[ns..
In Excerpt 6, Mike’s turn at line 3 is a repetition of Vic’s response ‘s’preme
being’. It is produced through downward intonation and placed in the third
turn relative to his question at turn one. This repeat is followed by a
 Y. PARK 155

confirmation (‘yeah’) and an elaboration of his own answer (‘I get confused
when I say supreme being and I::’). The repeat is different from a repair in that
the repeated turn does not contain a repairable element, and both speakers do
not act as though a trouble source occurred. Instead, the repeat targets the
information in the response as having been insufficient. Likewise, in Excerpt 7,
Deborah provides an example to support her previous response after a repeat
by the questioner has been issued.
If the utterance responded to by a repeat makes relevant a confirmation and
elaboration by the recipient and if the repeat is followed by a confirmation
only, a systematic possibility for the subsequent talk is that the recipient will

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produce or request the pending next action. In Excerpt 8, the student provides
a confirmation of the repeat but does not produce an account. The lack of an
account results in the recipient, that is, the teacher, producing the pending
second pair part after the confirmation. In the following case, the teacher asks
S2 about the weather in Taiwan. The student’s response provides an objective
account of the weather in Taiwan being humid and hot compared with the
present location, Los Angeles. The teacher repeats the terminal part of this
response (hot (!)).
Excerpt 8. NS-NNS
01 T: =countries
02 S1: mmm:[: ] that’s why I like LA.=
03 T: [mhm]
04 T: 1! = so er- uh how’s Taiwan, the weather in Taiwan.
05 S2: 2! The weather in Taiwan is more humid and hot.
06 T: 3! Hot.
07 S2: Yeah.
08 T: ! So it doesn’t have four- (.) four seasons?
09 (0.2)
10 S2: you mea[n s-
11 T: [it’s always summer there?
12 S2: mmm:: it’s not cold in Taiwan in s- in uh winter.
13 yeah.
14 T: so it’s similar to LA.
15 (0.2)
16 S2: yeah, similar to LA I think uh, the weather in
17 LA is more dry? And. (.) ˚ dry right
For the Taiwanese student, responding that the weather is humid and hot in
Taiwan may be a sufficient answer to the question (line 4, ‘how’s the weather
in Taiwan’) and not something that she needs to explain further. However, the
teacher pursues a more detailed explanation or clarification of the brief answer
by using a repeat (line 6: ‘Hot’). In this example, S2 orients to the repeat as an
inquiry by providing a confirmation but does not continue with an elaboration
that explains how Taiwan is more ‘hot’.2 The teacher orients to this response as
insufficient by adding a follow-up question that may clarify the teacher’s
156 THE ROLES OF THIRD-TURN REPEATS

motivation for repeating that part of the response (‘so it doesn’t have four
seasons?’). This question is met with further trouble as demonstrated by the
short pause at line 9 and a repair initiation (‘you mean’) by the student at line
10 (Jefferson 1980). Overlapping with S2, the teacher revises her question,
which is again met with trouble as indicated by the hesitation (‘mmm::’) and
an account that re-specifies her previous response. In this case, the teacher’s
repeat that proposes some elaboration of a previous response is not taken up by
the student and is pursued by the teacher in subsequent sequences.
In general, these third-turn repeats in our data make it relevant for the
previous respondent to provide a further elaboration and account of the re-

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sponse. The same action can be performed by questions that specifically ask for
elaboration (e.g. ‘Why do you say that?’). However, repeats in the same pos-
ition seem to enforce this action without overtly attending to the response as
being problematic in the way that questions do. Repeats make further talk
from the student relevant but do not mobilize a response as strongly as a
question would (e.g. Excerpt 8, line 8).3 As shown in the examples earlier in
the text, these repeats may create further opportunity for learning through
authentic language usage that is also found in ordinary conversational practise.

Third-turn repeats in form-and-accuracy contexts

In contrast to the third-turn repeats found in contexts in which students and
teachers are engaged in a more informal conversation with the pedagogical
goal of encouraging meaning and fluency, the examples shown in this section
occur in a more tightly controlled interaction in which the pedagogical focus is
on accuracy and learning of linguistic forms or lexical items. In this article,
these latter contexts are referred to as form-and-accuracy contexts following
Seedhouse’s categorization (2004). Again, the actions served by these repeats
were uncovered after analysis of actual classroom data. Typically, these repeats
follow display questions (Long and Sato 1983) and their responses. Display
questions, which are also known as test questions (Searle 1969), call for in-
formation that the teacher already knows; thus, not all student answers have
equal standing. In this context, teachers tend to follow more strictly than in the
previous context the three-part IRF sequence of utterances that is convention-
ally associated with classroom discourse. Because teachers and students both
know that these questions position teachers as having the information, and
thus occupying a knowing position, the third-turn repeat orients to this epi-
stemic positioning as well. By repeating, teachers provide feedback on the
adequacy of a student’s response in the third turn. In the following cases
taken from three different EFL classes, a simple three-turn sequence of (ques-
tion)-(answer)-(repeat of answer) marked by arrows 1–3 is deployed. In
Excerpt 9, students are given cards with pictures of food on them and the
class is participating in a series of questions to practise answering the question
‘What is X’s favorite Y?’ Excerpt 10 is a prefatory sequence taken from the
 Y. PARK 157

beginning part of the lesson, and Excerpt 11 occurs after students have
watched a short video clip on different types of fast foods.
Excerpt 9. CN-NP
01 T: How abo:::ut
02 (0.5)
03 T: 1! Eunhye. Eunhye, can you tell me::
04 (.)
05 1! your partner’s favorite food?
06 (0.2)
07 S: 2! Chicken.

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08 T: 3! Chicken. ^Oka::y
09 (0.2)
10 T: >Anybody who like the chicken,< raise your hand?

Excerpt 10. KH-S

01 T: 1! What’s today’s topic?
02 (0.8) ((points toward the board where today’s topic is written))
03 Ss: 2! Job aptitude.
04 T: 3! Job aptitude. And this is the second class about
05 job aptitude. And today’s objective i::s

Excerpt 11. CN-NP

01 T: Oka:y.=Anybody can guess what is the topic of today?
02 Ss: FOO::D[:
03 T: [Okay, Anything else? >What did you hear?<
04 (0.2) ((Logos of fastfood chains are shown on the front-screen))
05 Ss: [McDonald McDonald/KFC ((shouting in unison for 4.8 s.))
06 T: [Pizza, or chicken, (or) KFC.
07 What is the full name of KFC?
08 Ss: KENTURKY FRIED CHICK[E:N
09 T: 1! [Anyone- anything else?
10 (0.2)
11 S6: 2! Mac Donald.=
12 T: 3! = Mac Donald. >There was three big company<
13 (0.2)
14 T: 1! Mac Donald, Pizza Hut, a::nd?
15 (0.2)
16 Ss: 2! KF[C:
17 T: 3! [KFC:: and what is the pictures?
18 (.)
In each example, the teacher’s repeat in the third turn confirms that the
student’s answer is correct.4 In contrast to repeats in the previous section,
which only contained the repeat, teachers’ third-turn repeat in these instances
have a repeat plus a new first pair part. This turn format is distinct from the
158 THE ROLES OF THIRD-TURN REPEATS

format in the previous section and demonstrates the usage of repeats as part of
a series of instructional sequences. The repeats are not followed by an elabor-
ation by the student, and an account is not expected in structural terms (i.e.
the repeated turns are followed by further talk by the teacher without any
pause or hesitation that indicates trouble). By repeating the student’s response
(e.g. ‘Chicken’, ‘job aptitude’, and ‘KFC’), the teacher in a broader sense rati-
fies the answer as sufficient with regard to the purpose of the question, re-
gardless of what that may have been. Correcting grammar or pragmatics may
be part of the purpose of producing a repeat, but they may also be related to
the teacher’s questioning strategy to draw out a topic and only then move on

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to produce questions that are connected to the response being repeated by
recycling the word (‘Anybody who like the chicken’ in Excerpt 9) or using
‘and’-prefaced statements or questions about a related topic after the repeat
(‘and this is the second class’ in Excerpt 10 and ‘a::nd what is the pictures?’ in
Excerpt 11). Similar instances can also be found in ordinary conversation.
Excerpt 12. from Schegloff 2007: 17
01 Chi: What’s this
02 Mom: er::m (.) yo[u t]ell me: what is it
03 Chi: [8()8]
04 (1.0)
05 Chi: z:e:bra
06 Mom: ! zebra:: ye:s
In Excerpt 12, which is taken from an interaction between a mother and child,
the mother repeats the child’s answer (‘zebra’) to confirm its correctness.
Repeats after questions where the questioner has an expert status relative to
the other speaker strongly confirm that the questioner already knows the
answer. Therefore, repeats are well suited for instructional purposes in form-
and-accuracy contexts in which the teacher displays the differing status of
knowledge. Most of the questions used in these contexts have a right or
wrong answer, unlike in the previous sections (e.g. Excerpts 4–8) in which
the questions allowed for any response from a general category to be produced.
This epistemic imbalance in the initial question asked may explain why par-
ticipants orient differently to the third-turn repeat.
The confirmatory usage of repeats can be contrasted with cases in which
their production is abandoned. In the following example, the teacher is asking
students to discuss their future dream jobs. When the student provides a re-
sponse that is unsatisfactory, the teacher does not engage in repeats in the
third turn.
Excerpt 13. SS-H
01 T: 1! One more. What else?5
02 ((teacher points her finger at one student))
03 S: 2! What about entertainer?
04 T: 3!((teacher gazes at the student)) Enter- what is
 Y. PARK 159

05 entertainer? What is entertainer?

07 Ss: Haha[ha.((laughter))
08 S: [Singer.
09 T: Singer. Singer. Say singer and what else?

The student nominated by the teacher suggests ‘entertainer’, which is a bor-

rowed word in Korean that refers to singers and actors/actresses but may have
other meanings in English. The teacher starts to repeat the response (‘enter-’)
but stops mid-turn to clarify the meaning of entertainer and indicates a prob-
lem with the usage of the term by asking a question (‘what is entertainer?’).

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Students laugh, and one student volunteers ‘singer’ (line 8). The teacher
repeats the response twice (line 9: ‘Singer. Singer’) and thus engages in a
confirming action before moving onto the next question. Only when the
response is satisfactory does the teacher repeat the term and initiate another
related sequence. This preference of teachers not to give an overt ‘no’ or
correction to student responses has been reported in previous research
(Hellerman 2003; Seedhouse 2004).
In summary, it seems that the teacher may deploy repeats of students’
answers in the third turn to confirm the correctness of the answer and to
reinforce the language for the entire class before moving on to a related top-
ical sequence. These repeats are continuation-relevant when compared with
third-turn receipt objects, such as ‘okay’ or assessments that accept the re-
sponse and provide closure to the sequence. However, repeats in form-and-
accuracy contexts do not promote further talk from students in the way they
did in the previous section, as responses to display questions are fixed and do
not require any elaboration or account. This can be explained by the nature of
the parties’ knowledge status in display questions as opposed to referential
questions.
There seems to be a distinction between repeats that request an elaboration
and repeats that confirm the response before the talk moves on to a related
topical sequence. The two types of repeats are routinely associated with dis-
tinctive sequential environments that include different knowledge positions
of the participants. Elaborative repeats are produced in the following context:
(i) third-turn positions that follow unexpected or minimal responses to a pre-
vious question whereby the student is positioned as having more information
relative to the teacher; (ii) the repeat treats the previous response as embody-
ing some information that can be accounted for; and (iii) the repeat is recog-
nizable as ad hoc in character rather than as anticipated. Confirmatory repeats
emerge in contexts in which (i) they follow no-problem or correct responses to
previous questions, (ii) where the question is typically designed to test students
on their knowledge of language items, (iii) that thereby treats the previous
response as correct on consideration, and (iv) in which the answer is con-
firmed before moving on to the next turn, which may be an item in a line
or agenda of questions to be addressed. Through repetition, the teacher
160 THE ROLES OF THIRD-TURN REPEATS

presents language information to the class in a form produced by one of the

students.

THIRD-TURN REPEATS REVISITED

From the classroom data presented here, it can be seen that there are differ-
ences between third-turn repeats that call for an account and occur in mean-
ing-and-fluency contexts and third-turn repeats that provide confirmation and
are found in form-and-accuracy contexts. This section will show how each
turn is contingent on the moment-by-moment conduct of the participants

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and the interactional goal of the context. The following excerpt, in which
the pedagogical focus changes between line 6 and line 7 from promoting
form to being meaning-based, illustrates the contingent use of repeats in the
third position. The excerpt is taken from a Korean EFL classroom in which the
lesson goal is to learn how to summarize a reading passage. The teacher is
asking students to take turns producing sentences using the English word
‘since’. The third-turn repeat sequence is deployed in succession (!).
Excerpt 14. SDV_1305
01 S5: I can’t sleep these days since? ( )
02 T: Since? (0.2) After since you have to put subject and verb.
03 The whole sentence. I can’t sleep these days since? I:: HAVE TO::
04 study::. Yup. That’s good. How about Ilwoo?
05 S4: I love the actress since I saw the movie.
06 T: ! Mm I love the actress since I saw the movie.
07 What was that movie?=Iris?
08 S4: No.
09 T: ! No.
10 S4: Good Morning President.
11 T: ! Good Morning President.
12 S4: I love Chang Dong Kun.
13 T: Chang Dong Kun?
14 S3: [Actre::ss ((points toward sheet))
15(SS): [hh hh hahahaha
16 S4: Aha.
17 T: Actress. Here actress. We’re talking about actress. Not actor.
18 S3: Megan Fox.= ((gazes toward S4))
19 S4: =Han Che[young.
This excerpt begins with S5 displaying trouble in producing a full sentence
using the word ‘since’ (line 1). The turn ends with a ‘try-marked’ (Sacks and
Schegloff 1979) rising intonation contour which is used when a speaker is
uncertain whether a certain form is appropriate for this recipient (in this
case, the teacher). The teacher repeats the last segment of S5’s turn (line 2:
‘since?’), which initiates repair. When S5 offers no further talk (indicated by
the 0.2 s pause), the teacher explains the syntactic structure involved in
 Y. PARK 161

forming a ‘since’ clause and completes the sentence for him (lines 03–04: ‘I
can’t sleep these days since? I:: HAVE TO study::’). After a rather perfunctory
evaluation (‘that’s good’), the teacher turns to Ilwoo (S4) and asks him to
produce another sentence using ‘since’. S4 provides a linguistically correct
sentence (line 5: ‘I love the actress since I saw the movie’), and the teacher
repeats the response in the following third turn (line 6). The student’s turn is
hardly communicative, as the student has used the syntactic slot provided in
the work sheet (‘I love the actress since _______’) and has merely included the
words ‘I saw the movie’. Up to line 6, the pedagogical aim of the lesson was to
correctly use the language form ‘since’ and to be able to produce grammatically

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accurate sentences. In this context, the teacher produces a display of consult-
ing her own knowledge of the correctness of the answer with the repeat,
which acts as a confirmation of the answer provided by S4. After the repeat
turn, however, the teacher produces a question regarding the movie that S4
saw (‘What was that movie?’). The teacher thereby switches the pedagogical
focus from language forms to creating meaning where the domain of informa-
tion falls on the student. Instead of waiting for a response, the teacher asks a
yes/no question and immediately provides a candidate answer (‘=Iris?’), pos-
sibly to make the question more answerable. S4’s response (‘no’) correctly
serves as a reply to the teacher’s yes/no question in structural terms.
However, pragmatically, when a yes/no question is responded to negatively,
the preferred conversational norm is to follow it with an account or explan-
ation (Raymond 2003), which is lacking in the student’s turn. In this context,
the teacher follows this response with a repeat of S4’s ‘no’ (line 9). S4 proceeds
to add the title of the movie that he had watched (‘Good Morning President’).
When the teacher once again repeats this reply (line 11), the student provides
the reason for choosing this movie (line 12: ‘I love Chang Dong Kun’), namely,
he loved the main actor who starred in the movie. This response is contradict-
ory to his earlier sentence that had included the word ‘actress’ (line 5: ‘I love
the actress since I saw the movie’). When the teacher repeats ‘Chang Dong
Kun?’ with a rising intonation, this is immediately treated as a prompt for
repair, and several students correct S4’s mistake.6 Although S4 seems to realize
his mistake, the teacher goes on to explain that the worksheet contains the
word ‘actress’ rather than ‘actor’. This account is followed by the student self-
repairing his response to ‘Han Cheyoung’ (a Korean actress) in competition
with his friend’s suggestion ‘Megan Fox’.
In this short excerpt, both types of third-turn repeats examined in previous
sections are used by the teacher with different sequential consequences. The
repeat in line 6 is interpreted differently from the repeats in lines 9 and 11. In
lines 9 and 11, the teacher uses repeats to induce further talk by treating the
student’s response to the initial question as inadequate. In contrast, in line 6,
the teacher uses the repeat to confirm the student’s response before moving on
to the next sequence within the same topical agenda. This illustrates how
simply identifying the teacher’s turns as repeats and nothing more would
162 THE ROLES OF THIRD-TURN REPEATS

result in the local contingencies of interpretive actions that provide the repeats
with their sensible context being missed.
It should, however, be emphasized that although repeats followed by elab-
oration are recurrent in the third turn of the IRF sequence, they are by no
means obligatory. For example, the following excerpt from an EFL classroom
contains a similar sequence that resembles Excerpt 4. It occurs in a teacher–
student conversation, but the response is not followed by a repeat. Instead, the
teacher (T) proceeds to ask a related question that probes ‘what’ S2 will be
studying hard.
Excerpt 15. KU-summer

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01 T: So what will you do May, summer vacation during the summer vacation.
02 S1: Uh, I will study hard.
03 S2: Oh[hh
04 T: ! [About what?
05 SS: haha[ha
06 S2: [About game?
07 S1: U:h, uh, in next next month, I have TEPS test, so before TEPS test
08 I will study very very very hard and I’ll go to u:::h >ah, practical
09 music<.
In line 4, the teacher could have repeated the last part of S1’s response (‘study
hard’), but instead, she asks a question (‘about what?’) that overlaps with S2’s
evaluative marker (‘ohhh’) marked as such by its exaggerated intonation. The
question invokes more laughter from the students and a joking rejoinder from
S2 (‘about game?’); however, it turns out that S1 was serious about studying
hard, and in lines 07–08, he begins to explain why he needs to do so. The
occurrence of such sequences indicates that ‘repeat’ is an optional pragmatic
choice that is used to underscore the teacher’s orientation to a response as
incomplete or insufficient. However, it is not an obligatory marker of responses
after questions.
The earlier proposed schema can be revised based on our findings so far.
The consequences of repeats can be schematized as follows depending
on the nature of the question asked, which is reflexively related to the peda-
gogical focus of the interaction. In referential questions, teachers pos-
ition themselves in a relatively unknowing (or K-) position relative to the
students, and the sequences that follow orient to that knowledge status,
whereas in display questions, both teachers and students orient to the teacher
as knowing (K+).

Repeats in meaning-and-fluency contexts

Teacher: (Referential) question (K-) Turn 1
Student: Answer Turn 2
Teacher: Repeat of turn 2 Turn 3
Student: Elaboration Turn 4
 Y. PARK 163

Repeats in form-and-accuracy contexts

Teacher: (Display) question7 (K+) Turn 1
Student: (Correct) Answer Turn 2
Teacher: Repeat of turn 2/Further talk by the teacher Turn 3
In each of these contexts, both teachers and students orient to the different
authorship of the given knowledge, and this is displayed in these structural
schemes and contexts. They are oriented to what they know about the nature
of the answer, who the questioner is, and how sufficient the given answer is.
The analysis presented in this article illustrates how the teacher and students

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produce and recognize these resources for understanding their lessons by com-
paring the usage of repeats in two different contexts that can co-exist in a
classroom.

CONCLUSION
This study reported different functions of repetitions by teachers and different
interactional trajectories that include and follow repetitions in two task con-
texts to show how repeats should be understood in their local context.
Although previous studies have acknowledged the ubiquity of repeats in class-
rooms and have suggested their usefulness in language learning (Duff 2000),
relatively little consideration has been given to the interactional context in
which the repeats are produced. In this study, a close examination of data
taken from a variety of L2 classroom settings reveals that repeats are reflexively
related to the pedagogical focus of the context and, therefore, are influenced
by the type of questions that display a distinctive epistemic status between
teacher and students. The action after repeats is contingent on the nature of
the questioning turns and the context in which the repeats are used. In mean-
ing-and-fluency contexts, repeats of student response turns have been shown
to promote the progress of the sequence by encouraging the recipient, that is,
the student, to elaborate on the previous response in the form of an account.
In form-and-accuracy contexts, third-turn repeats confirm the response and
provide a coherent activity chain for the teacher. Most importantly, the ex-
amples provide evidence of how participants build and orient turn-by-turn to
the sequential organization of talk-in-interaction by steering the discourse into
a particular direction through talk, thus illustrating the social processes of
learning in classroom discourse (Cazden 2001).
The analysis has helped develop our understanding of how constructs such
as learning and competence are realized in interactions. When the learners do
not complete sequences in the same manner as the speakers in the conversa-
tional excerpts (Excerpts 6 and 7), the teacher orients to that and attempts to
make the sequence flow as in a conversation (Excerpt 8). This type of inter-
action serves as evidence of how conversation analysis may provide us with a
realistic idea of what actually happens in language learning talk and enables a
process account of language learning through interaction (Pekarek Doehler
164 THE ROLES OF THIRD-TURN REPEATS

2010; Seedhouse 2011). This study shows that students can learn to interact in
different sequential and action formats in the classroom by engaging in mean-
ingful interaction with the teacher and their peers where an overwhelming
number of repeats are present.
The current study has practical implications. First, repeats can be a useful
resource for teachers who want to promote fluency exercises. L2 classrooms
are filled with teachers’ questions, and students are reluctant to produce long
stretches of talk or speak more than is asked, particularly in EFL contexts. In L2
classrooms, students may have a stronger tendency to withhold further details
after giving a one-turn response to a question unless invited to talk more

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(Tsui 1996; Seedhouse 2004). Repetition of certain parts of or the entire re-
sponse addresses the newsworthiness of the repeated elements so that the
respondent can elaborate without being constrained to a specific type of
answer that would be provoked by a question. Secondly, using conversation
analysis methodology to consider student–teacher interactions can encourage
others to begin viewing classroom interaction in similar terms. A deeper
understanding of classroom interaction can be gained by evaluating the data
in context and using the responses of participants to determine what the
speaker seemed to be doing at a given instance. As shown in Excerpt 14, the
action served by repeats is determined within its local sequential environment.
Thirdly, the findings may be useful for future language teacher training.
Teacher training programmes may benefit by showing classroom interaction
data such as these that contain authentic usages of teachers’ third-turn repeats
and by demonstrating how they are interpreted by participants in different
classroom contexts.
Having exemplified the use of repeats as practises for requesting an elabor-
ation and confirming a response, we must register that each use of repeats
represents a practise that is part of a range of options open to a speaker to carry
out a relevant third-turn response, and it is the context and the sequential
action of the particular repeat that determines the range of other practises and
responsive options among which that particular repeat practise is found.
Cazden (2001), after analysing teachers’ use of indirect directives in classroom
discourse, refers to these as exemplifying the expression of social meaning in
the choice of any formal alternative. The repeat practises used by teachers can
be viewed in the same light. Teachers should take advantage of these options
hoping that students will comply with their intended requests. Many repeats in
the classroom are used to implement other actions as well, and this is a topic
that could be further pursued in future studies on L2 classroom interaction
implicated in real-time classroom discourse.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank John Heritage for valuable insights that formed the basis of this
study on repeats. She would also like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their

valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. This work was supported by the National
Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2012-S1A5A8-
022317).
NOTES
1 It should be noted that repeats of either
all or part of a preceding turn may not
only act as a repair initiation practise
that leads to correction (such as
Excerpt 3) but may also be used for
other actions, such as receipt registra-
tion or to target a following action
(Schegloff 1997).
2 Indeed, not all repeats in this position
challenge the response or act as a re-
quest for elaboration. Some third-turn
repeats have been analysed as register-
ing receipt or doing repair (most com-
monly through rising intonation). This
may explain S2’s understanding of the
repeat as identifying one item (‘hot’) to
be confirmed through a ‘yeah’ token
rather than as a request for elaboration.
The ambiguity of the usage of repeats
for the parties themselves is described
by Schegloff (1997).
3 According to Stivers and Rossano
(2010), turns designed with the follow-
ing four features—interrogative lexico-
morphosyntax, interrogative prosody,
recipient tilted epistemic asymmetry,
and recipient-directed speaker gaze—
can be used by a speaker in a scalar
fashion to mobilize a response from
the recipient to different degrees.
4 In a classroom with >20 students, stu-
dent responses are often low-volume,
and directed to the teacher, hence, dif-
ficult for other students to hear.
Therefore, teacher repetitions may
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