TITLE:
Laughter as Same-Turn Self-Repair Initiation in L2 Oral Proficiency Interview
AUTHORS:
Yan Gao
KEYWORDS:
Self-Repair, Self-Initiated, Same-Turn, Laughter, L2
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.8 No.4,
April
24,
2020
ABSTRACT: Repair is the effort that speaker makes to smooth utterances or
conversations in order to achieve the ongoing progressivity of the turn. Among
the types of repair, self-repair is mostly preferred (Schegloff et
al., 1977) in talk-in-interaction, and in self-repair,
self-initiated self-repair is mostly preferred, especially when it happens in the same turn. Therefore it has
received much attention. In the gate-keeping interviews for Chinese candidates
to get access to the target college in Britain, there occurs in L2 a large
number of same-turn self-initiated self-repair cases, in which the initiation
is no longer the single lexical words, or the non-lexical pauses like cut-off,
or sound stretches as has been studied, but the paralinguistic device,
laughter. Despite the numerous studies on roles of laughter, there is hardly a
mention of laughter employed as a self-repair initiation. Consequently, this
study determines on the focus on laughter as a self-repair initiator in L2, and
aims to identify its exact shape and positions in self-repair and relevant
repairing segment, therefore concluding on its specific functions and its
relations with delicacy. This study wishes to contribute to the researches on
self-repair initiation in Conversation Analysis and on laughter in particular
L2 testing context.