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The relevance of repair for classroom correction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2006

DOUGLAS MACBETH
DOUGLAS MACBETH
Affiliation:
School of Educational Policy & Leadership, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article attempts to align a familiar task of classroom teaching, eliciting from students correct answers about their lessons, with a major organizational domain in studies of natural conversation, that of conversational repair. Numerous studies have analyzed correction sequences in classroom discourse, and our discussion pays special attention to McHoul's (1990) treatment of “repair in classroom talk.” McHoul directly measures the findings on repair in studies of natural conversation to the regularities of correction sequences in classroom lessons. It is argued, contra McHoul, that repair is a different, and prior, order of discursive work, and one that premises the very possibility of classroom correction. Further, the difference may have wider relevance for understanding repair and correction as “co-operating” organizations of talk-in-interaction more generally.

Keywords

Conversation analysisclassroom discoursecorrectionethnomethodologyrepair.
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 33 , Issue 5 , November 2004 , pp. 703 - 736
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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