Toward a Pragmatic Assessment of Other‐Initiated Repair: Development of a Pragmatics‐Oriented Coding System

ABSTRACT Other‐initiated repair (OIR) is a vital interactional resource for L2 learners, enabling them to signal trouble in understanding and maintain communication flow. While prior studies have examined sequential patterns, such as shifts from other‐repair to self‐repair, they emphasize structure, paying less attention to pragmatic aspect of OIR due to a lack of fine‐grained pragmatic tools. This study develops a new coding system to assess OIR strategies from a pragmatics perspective. To this end, we first designed a discourse completion test (DCT) to elicit OIR and pilot tested it. Second, we formulated a preliminary pragmatics‐oriented OIR coding system (POCS) for OIR based on data from native speakers of three typologically distinct languages: English ( N = 30), Spanish ( N = 32), and Chinese ( N = 59). Third, we validated the POCS through its application to a study that explored OIR production by Chinese learners of English as a foreign language ( N = 32) across power and social distance situations. Results showed that the DCT elicited diverse OIR strategies and that POCS demonstrated high coder agreement while capturing group differences in OIR strategy use and form realization, as well as sensitivity to contextual variation shaped by power and social distance. These findings demonstrate the potential of the coding system for assessing key components of pragmatic competence.