Turn taking, repair initiators, and linguistic categories of self-repair in advanced female Iranian EFL learners

The present study investigates turn taking, initiators and linguistic categories of self-repair in classroom conversations among advanced female EFL learners in three language institutes in Isfahan, Iran, to clarify the students’ and teachers’ participation in taking turns, and the most frequent linguistic categories of self-repairs. Forty female EFL learners were selected from the advanced level classes of the institutes. 36 hours of videotaped single-sex conversations (six sessions of three classes) were collected through classroom observations. To enrich the data, follow-up interviews were conducted. The students’ utterances were analyzed qualitatively using Schegloff et al.’s (1977) repair initiation techniques and Sacks et al.’s (1974) turn taking system. The results were compared then with previous studies conducted on English native speakers’ and Persian native speakers’ interactions. The results indicated that the majority of the turns were taken by the students and through self-initiated transfers. The data analysis also revealed that most of the observed errors were repaired through non-lexical utterances. Regarding the linguistic categories of self-initiated self-repair, only grammatical and lexical errors were corrected by the participants. There were differences in the types of grammatical errors corrected by Iranian EFL learners versus English native speakers.