Corpus-based Study Of Self-repair In English Majors' Oral Output

Self-repair is a significant indicator to the learners'oral proficiency in speech production. In 1977, E. A. Schegloff et al. first proposed the term "repair". Their research reveals that self-repair is the most important type of repairs, later on, the study on self-repair becomes the hot spot of second language acquisition research, because the learner's language development can be reflected by self-repair, the study of which can let us recognize the nature and monitoring mechanism of spoken language.Based on the importance of self-repair in L2 acquisition and existing theoretical foundations of self-repair, sixty oral samples from the year of 2004 are chosen from Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners as the data of this present study. The oral test contains three tasks (story-telling; monologue; conversation), but only monologue task is considered as the focus in this present study with quantitative and qualitative methods adopted. This thesis aims to study the general features and model of self-repair by English majors in TEM-4 Spoken Test, and to investigate the difference of self-repairs employed by learners with different proficiency levels. In the corpus, self-repairs can be identified, collected and marked by a series of tags and then the analysis of self-repair is conducted with the help of the computer software.According to the analysis of self-repairs, the study presents that learners frequently perform self-repair in monologue task in testing situation. Error self-repair takes the highest percentage, and then it is followed by different information self-repair and appropriateness self-repair among different types of self-repairs. Among the different subtypes of self-repairs, lexical self-repair, morphological error self-repair and non-morphological error self-repair are more frequent than others; furthermore, the study also shows that there exists significant differences in using self-repairs among proficiency levels of different learners.The findings of the present study have the significant implications for foreign language pedagogy. Self-repair can help learners realize the gap between linguistic knowledge and their actual oral output. L2 teachers can know the weaknesses by students'self-repair so as to improve the automatic levels of the students.