Longitudinal Tracking of Persistence in Other‐Repair Practices in an Audio‐Mediated English Private Tutoring Setting

Abstract Private tutoring—or shadow education—has received ample scholarly attention due to increasing demand from parents for reasons of social mobility in ESL/EFL contexts. Referred to as English private tutoring (EPT) for language learning purposes, this type of non‐formal education shares certain features of formal education like content and classroom interactional practices such as teachers' management of turn‐taking and repair practices. However, despite the surge of EPT across the globe, how tutors manage other‐repair, a regular classroom interactional and pedagogical practice, in EPT settings remains unexamined. To fill this gap, this study uses Conversation Analysis to explore longitudinally how a tutor's use of other‐repair practices unfolds in response to the learner's recurring responses involving syntactic repairable items. The dataset consists of audio recordings from eight 20‐minute audio‐mediated one‐to‐one tutoring sessions, in which participants only interact via audio. The analysis demonstrates how the tutor's orientations to trouble sources in syntactically similar learner responses appear on a longitudinal basis. The findings highlight the persistence of teacher repair practices in the face of recurring learner responses and how this unfolds longitudinally in‐and‐through interaction, hence shedding more light on the interactional dynamics of the private tutoring settings.