EFL Classroom Repair Strategies By An English Non-Native Teacher To Tertiary Students In The UAE

Abstract

According to its negative results in English as a second language (ESL) classrooms, researchers shifted their concentration and strategies from focusing on the input to focusing on the output as it has many merits for students’ development. Swan’s (1985) comprehensible output hypothesis encouraged the interaction between students and their teachers. Consequently, there are four repair strategies in classroom interaction. This mixed-method research aims at looking into types of divergent repair strategies that a teacher uses at the tertiary level classroom to correct students’ productions in academic writing online lectures, and its effect on student’s modification output while acquiring the knowledge. Therefore, it will concentrate on observing the classroom interaction between collegiate students and a teacher to answer the following questions:

1. What are the repair strategies used in the classroom?

2. To what extent the teacher encourages the learner’s output?

This paper is divided into six sections. In the following lines, the literature review with different SLA theories related to the output in SLA, repair strategies, and a critical review of the output of interlanguage will be depicted. To answer the first question, classroom observation has been done. To answer the second question, a semi-structured interview with the teacher has been conducted. Data is analyzed in terms of Varonis and Gass’s (1985) framework. In the framework, there are four initiations that could control the classroom interaction: self-initiation (SI) > self-repair (SR), Other-initiation (OI) > self-repair (SR), self-initiation (SI) > other-repair (OR), and other-initiation (OI) > other-repair (OR). The four initiations with their categories will be compared between the two classes. The -categories are: Lexical, syntactical, and semantic. The Lexical category has two elements: phonological and morphological. The Syntactical category has two elements: Phrase and sentence. The Semantic category has three elements: synonyms, substitutions, and descriptions. Data reveal that although all strategies have been used in the classroom, the most frequent strategy used is the other-initiation>other-repair strategy. In addition, it reveals that the less frequent strategy used in the classroom is the self-initiation>self-repair strategy. Moreover, there is a lack of knowledge the teacher has in knowing the best strategy and its effect on the student’s development.