Laughter, as an important interactional resource, has been recognized as not simply a response to humor in many researches. It is much related to an action formation from the perspective of Conversation Analysis. In this oral proficiency interviews for admission into a certain English college between native interviewer and Chinese candidates, there appear quite a number of cases in which laughter serves as the major constituent of the responding turn to the first pair part (FPP) (except for questions) in terms of adjacency pair. This study, therefore, identifies those responding actions that laughter performs, or concurrently constructs, from the perspective of Conversation Analysis, and explores the reasons why laughter is employed and the roles that laughter has achieved. Hence it contributes to the understanding of laughter as a resource of alignment or affiliation in oral proficiency interview, and consequently a vital paralinguistic constituent of L2 interactional competence.

Repair is the effort that speaker makes to smooth utterances or conversations in order to achieve the ongoing progressivity of the turn. Among the types of repair, self-repair is mostly preferred (Schegloff et al., 1977) in talk-in-interaction, and in self-repair, self-initiated self-repair is mostly preferred, especially when it happens in the same turn. Therefore it has received much attention. In the gate-keeping interviews for Chinese candidates to get access to the target college in Britain, there occurs in L2 a large number of same-turn self-initiated self-repair cases, in which the initiation is no longer the single lexical words, or the non-lexical pauses like cutoff , or sound stretches as has been studied, but the paralinguistic device, laughter. Despite the numerous studies on roles of laughter, there is hardly a mention of laughter employed as a self-repair initiation. Consequently, this study determines on the focus on laughter as a self-repair initiator in L2, and aims to identify its exact shape and positions in self-repair and relevant repairing segment, therefore concluding on its specific functions and its relations with delicacy. This study wishes to contribute to the researches on self-repair initiation in Conversation Analysis and on laughter in particular L2 testing context.