Laughter as Same-Turn Self-Repair Initiation in L2 Oral Proficiency Interview

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.