A Conversation Analysis of Staff Members’ and Researchers’ Repair Strategies in the Iraqi University Viva Discussions in English

Abstract

This article studies the Conversation Analysis (CA) of Iraqi university staff members’ and researchers’ self-repair and other-repairs strategies in the Iraqi University Viva Discussions in English (IUVDE). It aims at constructing a model for repair strategies to describe those academic discussions in English, which is taken from representative authors and writers, studying and analyzing repair strategies and correction, and arriving at the types of self-repair and other-repair operations and strategies used by the participants in the study, something which characterize their academic discussions. The collected data of the study include four hours and ten minutes of audiotaped oral interactions of the staff members and researchers’ interactions in the viva discussions of some departments in some universities in Iraq. The data is recorded in 2019. The theoretical framework adopted in this study is a CA one.

The study concludes that the eclectic model suggested and applied in this study, being comprehensive, works successfully to describe the designated areas and types of repair strategies, the staff members (examiners) in the discussions prove proficient in using self-repair and other-repair operations efficaciously. It is also concluded that the Iraqi university staff members and researchers use self-repair strategies which are recycling, deleting, reformatting replacing, inserting aborting, sequence jumping, and reordering, and they use other-repair ones which are candidate understanding, partial repeats, full repeats, replacement candidate understanding, open class repairs, request for translation and explanation, request for definition and explanation, interrogative words and request for repetition. Likewise, staff members are proven to produce more repair cases than researchers.