Juliane Schönfeldt
& Andrea Golato
Repair in chats: A conversation analytic approach
This paper grew out of discussions in a graduate seminar on conversation analysis offered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In this paper, Juliane’s interest in online communication (i.e., web chats) and Andrea’s interests in the organization of ordinary conversation in German (i.e., preference organization and repair) are coming together: We start out by describing the interactional organization of a German web chat program, comparing it to the organization of ordinary conversation. In this comparison, we focus on a) the technical aspects of web chat communication that have an impact on interaction, b) “turns,” turn-transition space, turn taking, and c) adjacency pairs and sequence organization. Subsequently, we investigate the organization of repair in web chats, focusing on the positions from which repair can be initiated and the types of trouble sources such repairs address.
In a larger project on CA and Chats funded by the Research Board of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, we analyze when, why, and how participants adjust the practices from ordinary conversation to suit the particular conditions of the medium of web chats.
Juliane Schönfeldt is a Ph.D. student in German and Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education and Andrea Golato is an Assistant Professor of German, Linguistics, and English as an International Language at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
