Students' self-repair in EFL classroom interactions: implications for classroom dynamics

This study aimed to evaluate whether or not students engage in self-help behavior when they encounter difficulties during their presentations. The participants were second year EFL college trainees; the data were obtained from their classroom presentations. The audio recorded data has been transcribed, coded, and categorized into quantitative and qualitative data. Descriptive statistical tools were employed to analyze the quantitative component, while thematic analysis was used to explain the qualitative data. Based on the findings, the students engaged in different kinds of strategies for self-repair, including same-information repair (repetition) 48 (36.9%); appropriateness repair 46 (35.4%); error repair 32 (24.6%); and back-to-error 4 (3.1%). From the point of view of the trouble sources that trigger self-repair, this research highlighted difficulties with syntactic and lexical errors as the most prevalent problems among EFL learners. The self-repair evidences revealed the importance of giving time for students to modify their utterances by themselves. In addition, the result could help teachers determine where to focus their efforts in helping students.