Linguistic repair work in an English L1 community: could there be lessons to learn for the L2 classroom?

The study assessed repair work in an English native community in USA using both English native (NS) and English non-natives speakers (NNS) data. The main aims included assessment of the speakers’ use of language in specific contexts of repair work; their deployment of social knowledge and expectations when doing repair work; differences and similarities between native and non-native speakers’ behavior, and possible lessons that could be learned for the L2 classroom. The assumptions of the study were that accounts and apologies would tend to occur more with interlocutors in close and distant relationships, respectively. Overall, that is what the study found out. Corollary to that, the study found that realization of repair work is a function of perceived social distance, and that for most part the behavior displayed by NS and NNS during repair work is similar. Despite the general trend, NNS data showed that speakers may use different pragmalinguistic resources dependent on different sociopragmatic exigencies or expectations, where it concerns assignment of distance to relations, responsibility sharing, explicit acknowledgement of blame, among others. On the one hand, the findings bear some implications to the L2 classroom, especially where it concerns the need to deploy teaching approaches that are descriptive and reflexive; ones that help learners to trigger, deploy and explore their attentional processes in the classroom, and on the other hand, they pose some challenges to the current paradigm which privileges some NS forms, norms and rituals in the L2 classroom.Keywords: repair work, social distance, attentional processes, pragmalinguistic switc