A conversation analysis of repair organization in Dr. Zakir Naik question and answer based conversation

Abstract

Conversational repair plays a vital role for human beings to keep a conversation going. Conversational repair prevents a continuous conversation from being interrupted and helps to minimize the potential for misunderstanding. It is important to identify how conversational repair is organized in a question and answer session. This study explored how intersubjectivity is maintained between Dr. Zakir Naik and his audience in comparative religion question and answer sessions. Intersubjectivity can be defined as the mutual understanding gained by both the speaker and the audience in a conversation during a question and answer session. Eight different audience members who participated in the question and answer sessions of Dr. Zakir Naik were taken from the YouTube channel. In those conversations, the videos were transcribed and analyzed by the researcher to investigate the repair organization. Using the conversation analysis (CA) method, this study explored how conversational repairs are organized to achieve mutual understanding between the speaker and the audience. The study found that self-initiated self-repair is the most common type of conversational repair used by the speaker and audience, followed by other-initiated self-repair, self-initiated other-repair, and other-initiated other-repair. The study also found that the approach to intersubjectivity, self-knowledge, paralinguistic, 'particular value' and rejoinder contribute to the achievement of mutual understanding between Dr. Zakir and his audience during question and answer sessions. In addition, the study found that Dr. Zakir used the term 'brother' and 'sister' when referring to his audience to show brotherhood in Islam, friendliness, relationship, respect and cultural influence in his conversations. Finally, the findings revealed that Dr. Zakir Naik used English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) (i.e. Bible, Quran, chapter, verse, Allah, Alhamdulillah) in the selected comparative religious dialog videos to address a multi-religious community. KEYWORDS: Conversational repairs, Intersubjectivity, brother, sister, ESP, LSP, conversation analysis.