Multimodal Self-and Other-Initiated Repairs in L2 Peer Interactions

Overview & Synopsis

This study examines the multimodal organization of self-and other-initiated repairs in L2 peer interactions between French secondary pupils. While self-repairs typically reflect errors and language difficulties at different levels (syntactic, lexical, phonological, etc.) and are treated as (dis)fluency features, repair mechanisms are not solely responses to linguistic errors but may be used as tools to negotiate meaning and manage misunderstandings, especially through other-repairs. Adopting a multimodal approach, this study focuses on the visual-gestural properties of repairs, based on different articulators (face, head, and hands). Results show a preference for self-repairs over other-repairs, especially those associated with lexical and syntactic difficulties. Other-repairs mainly consist of restricted offers in contexts of misunderstanding and acceptability problems. Findings also reveal distinct multimodal patterns depending on the type of the repair. A more detailed qualitative analysis of the data highlights the sequential relationship between self-and other-repairs.