Corrections as multiparty accomplishment in L2 classroom conversations

• In the L2 classroom, corrections often occur in multiparty constellations.
• Peer corrections and vicarious responses are parts of multiparty talk.
• Both teacher's and peers’ corrections are often embedded and ambiguous.
• Correction trajectories at times disambiguate ‘what is the trouble’: meaning/form.
• Multimodal resources (e.g. prosody, laughter) attenuate exposure of corrections.

Much research on classroom talk has had a dyadic teacher-student bias. This study documents multiparty aspects of repair work through analyses of talk in a classroom community. Drawing on 40 h of video-recordings from Swedish L2 lessons in a language immersion classroom, participant contributions were analyzed as those of a party (Schegloff, 1995), rather than merely as individual contributions. The detailed analyses of correction trajectories reveal that both the teacher and the students produced exposed corrections (Jefferson, 1987) as well as embedded corrections (corrective recasts). The analyses illuminate the teacher's sustained efforts in tailoring classroom talk to the classroom community's displayed understanding and varying skills, something that involved a continuous balancing act between form-accuracy and conversational progressivity. Moreover, the analyses document student agency (e.g. vicarious responses, chorus responses and peer corrections). In moving away from a dyadic bias, this study of repair work contributes to situated analyses of classroom corrections.