Browsing by Author "Salmi, Hanna-Kaisa"

During the past decade Finland has become an increasingly multilingual country, and the need for understanding bilingual development of children has grown. The purpose of this study is to analyze conversational self-repair used by sequential bilinguals. Examining children´s self-repairs provide information of their ability to monitor conversation and the development of their language skills. The aim is to investigate how 4-to-5-year-old children who adopt Finnish as their second language use self-repair to solve problems in speaking and to create mutual understanding. The repairs that are self-initiated or other-initiated by the adults are taken into account. The focus is to investigate how the self-repair is initiated, in which part of the repair sequence the correction takes place, and what is repaired. The data of this study is taken from the PAULA research project, which aims to investigate the impact of small group activities on supporting the language learning of children who acquire Finnish as their second language. The data was recollected in 2018 in a city that is located in southern Finland. The subjects of study (N=7) were between 4;11 and 5;7 years old. They were normally developed sequential bilinguals who participated in the small group sessions that took place in their daycares. The material (1h 49 min) consisted of video recordings of two different types of tasks, a fishing game and grocery store play. The video data was transcribed and analyzed by the means of conversational analysis. The results show that children who adopt Finnish as their second language initiate repairs in many lexical (e.g. repetitions, adding and changing words) and non-lexical ways (e.g. cut-off or non-verbally). Other-initiated repair sequences was pointed out by questions (e.g. what, which, or why), giving semantic or phonological cues and making direct corrections. The results shows that the self-repair was preferred. Most of the children´s self-repairs took place in the same turn with the problem and in the third position. However, some of the repair sequencies formed much more complex patterns. The self-repair was used to correct vocabulary, semantics, and the situation. In addition, nonverbal means became central both in marking the need for repair and using it as a repair. Nonverbal repairs were used for example to replace missing vocabulary, to create common understanding of the situation, or to guide the interpretation of the words and meanings. The results encourage to monitor children’s ability to repair their speech in verbal or nonverbal manner to support the speech and language skills that they are acquiring.