The Use of Self-Repair Strategies in Classroom Conversations: Does the Teacher’s Level of Reflection Make a Difference?

Abstract

To better understand the pattern of language use and classroom interactions, this sequential mixed-methods study investigated the teachers' use of self-repair strategies based on their level of reflection. To this end, 33 Iranian EFL teachers were selected from various institutions in Tehran. Data for the quantitative phase were collected from the reflectivity questionnaire developed by Akbari, Behzadpour, and Dadvand (2010). Regarding the qualitative phase of the study, 70 hours of English instruction and classroom interactions of the 33 teachers were recorded and analyzed, using Fox and Jasperson's (1995) classification of self-repair strategies. The quantitative analyses of the results, employing one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), indicated that there was a significant difference between the reflective groups in terms of the total repair strategy use. Further, the results of Kruskal Wallis analysis revealed that there was a statistically significant difference between high and low reflective teachers in terms of the repair strategies types “H, J, K, and L", which generally refer to the “Replacement, Repetition, and Addition of a lexical item". The results of the qualitative analysis also showed that the most frequent self-repair strategy of high, mid, and low reflective teachers was strategy “A" or “repetition of a lexical item".