The papers looks at how L1 and L2 -native speakers of English deal with breakdowns in conversation.
What is it about?
The paper is based on naturalistic data collected in Halls of Residence in a UK University. It explores what differences in any there are between L1 and L2 speakers of English
Why is it important?
The paper identifies three possible areas of difficulty that may arise if a theory is not contextualised. Firstly, the paper argues that theory driven research encourages methods of data collection that we characterize as experimental and suggest that these need to be supplemented by more naturalistic forms of data collection. Secondly, the paper criticizes the view that there are general preferences as to who initiates and who completes repairs and argues that a contextualized theory of repair would capture initiation/completion patterns more adequately. Finally, the paper argues that the distinction between native and non-native speakers needs to be re-examined. This is supported by the finding in the pilot study that there was little variation between native and non-native speakers in terms of these analyses.