Mother-Tongue Differences and Repair Patterns Typology: A Contrastive Analysis of Persian and Turkmen EFL learners

Recently, there has been renewed interest in Conversational Analysis Studies on repair patterns.However, the trend of the research literature shows that no attempt was made to elaborate and quantify the impacts of Mother-tongue on different repair patterns in terms of typology among the Iranian Persian as monolingual and Turkmen as multilingual EFL learners. Having homogenized the participants in terms of their language proficiency test results in PET, 30 Persian and 30 Turkmen EFL learners ones were selected out of a larger group of 100 learners in Language classes in a secondary school in Gonbadkavous, a northern multilingual, multicultural city in Iran. The recorded conversations in four sessions were codified based on the two benchmarks ofthe repairs types of i.e. initiation and completion for Persian and Turkmen learners. The results of the study indicated that self-initiated other-repaired type of repair is among the most frequently occurred type of repair in the conversations of both Persian and Turkmen EFL learners. However, the Turkmen participants seemed to use other-initiated self-repaired type less frequently while it was the second mostly used type by Persian participants. Such a difference may be rooted in multilingualism and its impacts on repair pattern types. The results of the study may have some implications for those involved in Conversation Analysis studies and language pedagogy focusing multilingual and multicultural matters.

Keywords:

Contrastive Conversation Analysis , Turkmen EFL Learners , Repair Pattern , Typology