A Conversation Analysis of Repair Trouble Sources, Inadequacy and Positions in the Iraqi University Viva Discussions in English

Oral interaction is sometimes not articulated by its participants as perfect as they project. The unsuccessful instances of talk in exchange may cause serious communicative breakdowns between the involved partners of the interactive activity. Conversation analysis (CA) is privileged to have a powerful mechanism, which is called repair organization that is exploited in interaction to prevent and fix any variety of troubles in talk. This strategic organization of repair is then operated to capacitate talkers of unavoidable interactive breakdowns of talk. Accordingly, this study aims at observing, describing, analyzing and identifying the trouble sources of repair strategies which exist in the Iraqi university viva discussions in English, and investigating their repair positions and inadequacies. Likewise, it is hypothesized that misunderstanding errors is the most frequent trouble source of repairs in the Iraqi university viva discussions in English, non-repair is the most frequent repair inadequacy, and that the fourth position of repair is the most frequent position type. The procedure adopted to fulfil the aims and to verify the hypotheses include collecting data which consists of four hours and ten minutes of audiotaped oral interactions in the MA and Ph.D. viva discussions, developing a model for repair strategies from various theories in CA, observing and collecting the data by recording audiotaped samples of those interactions in viva discussions as sample of the study, putting the datasets into orthography, calculating and describing by the use of the model, and analyzing the dataset of the study qualitatively and quantitatively. The study concludes that the eclectic model suggested and applied in the study gives a multi- faceted description of the different repair study. It is found that repair sources of trouble include grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, discourse, factual information, channel, processing, misunderstanding errors, repair of no errors. It also exposes that there are zero occurrence of miss-repair, self-repair and other-repair failures, that pronunciation trouble source of repair results in the highest occurrences and that factual information and repair of no errors are the least frequent trouble sources. The study reveals that non-repair is the most frequent repair inadequacy and same turn repair position is the most frequent one.