Code-switched repair initiation: The case of Swedish eller in L2 English test interaction

Abstract Despite a long-standing interest in repair practices, much is yet to be learned about participants’ selections of components of the repair operation, and their systematic variation across contexts and languages ( Hayashi et al., 2013b , Kitzinger, 2013 ). The present paper targets the initiation of self-repair through examination of a particular discursive object, the Swedish conjunction eller (‘or’), located in repair-prefacing position in a corpus of 79 second language (L2) oral proficiency tests. In the corpus, eller is systematically produced in Swedish, while surrounding talk is produced in the target language, English. As such, the repair initiations are code-switched (e.g., Auer, 1998b ). Building on the recent work on or -prefaced repair initiations in English ( Lerner and Kitzinger, 2015 ), we examine the role of eller -initiated repair (EIR), i.e., repair prefaced by eller , in the context of paired L2 tests. We also contrast EIRs with or -prefaced repair initiations in the same dataset. Findings indicate that EIRs serve to display trouble awareness, which may relate to necessary revisions of both form and content of the talk in English. The ‘other-languageness’ ( Gafaranga, 2000 ) of the momentary code-switch amplifies test-takers’ attention to what needs to be replaced or revised, and indicates to co-participants that self-repair is underway. The practice helps push forward turn transition and pre-empts conclusions about the speaker's stance or linguistic competence, which may be particularly relevant in a language testing context.