3 Handling Sequentially Inapposite Responses Gabriele Kasper and Younhee Kim University of Hawai’i at Manoa Introduction As a critical interactional resource to establish or re-establish shared under- standing in talk-in-interaction, participants deploy various practices of repair organization. Repair can address any sort of problem in speaking, hearing and understanding, anywhere in the interaction, in any type of activity (Schegloff 1992b; Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks 1977). It is precisely the availability of a robust mechanism for dealing with trouble in interac- tion that permits oral non-scripted language use to be as ambiguous, indir- ect, allusive, elliptic, incoherent and otherwise ‘fundamentally flawed’ (Coupland, Wiemann and Giles 1991) as it is and yet enable participants to manage their language-mediated activities largely successfully (House, Kasper and Ross 2003; Schegloff 1991). Following Schegloff and colleagues’ (1977) seminal paper, a large volume of research attests to the ubiquity of repair in talk among linguistically expert speakers. Second language researchers working in the tradition of conversation analysis (CA) have been particularly interested in examining the formats and functions of repair in talk including second or foreign language speakers. The impetus for this focus comes first and foremost from the empirically sustained assumption that when shared linguistic resources are limited, mutual understanding may be at an increased risk, requiring more repair work from participants in order to manage their joint activities. A second line of inquiry into repair in L2 interaction takes its cue from second language acquisition research in the interactionist tradition, which accords repair initiated or completed by the trouble source recipient a critical role in L2 learning (Gass 2003). However, outside of classrooms (Seedhouse 2004) and other educational arrangements, other-completed repair, and especially other-repair of linguistic form, appears to be infrequent, while self-initiated repair in the same turn is most prevalent (Wagner and Gardner 2004). Speakers with less extensive L2 resources thus order their repair practices in the same way as expert speakers. Moreover, outside of language 22 April 3, 2007 19:45 MAC/LLTS Page-22 0230_517005_06_cha03