A Study Of Oral Production Processes Of Chinese EFL Learners

Research on the process and ability of language production has been a central topic in psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition. Considering the difficulty in collecting and analyzing oral corpus, the studies in this field are pale before that of reading and writing. Given such research gaps, this study, targeted at Chinese EFL learners, intends to explore the oral production process by focusing on the stages of oral production process, language of thought involved in the oral production process, use of strategies, and the influences of language of thought on oral production.Retrospective interview is the main data collection method while the information elicited from open questions and oral products are treated as supplementary. The participants, ten English majors from three grades were divided into five pairs and each pair was asked to conduct the same debate task. After the debate session, each pair and the researcher then retrospectively reviewed the audiotape. The participants were invited to comment on their utterances and behaviors and answer some questions. Both the debate session and the interview session were recorded for later transcription and analysis. The study used a qualitative approach to analyze the data and presented the findings illustrated with examples.The study found that students' oral production included three stages of planning, monitoring and repairing. Variations were found in how the students planned, monitored and corrected their products. Some students devoted several minutes to draw an outline, while others started the speaking act without overt planning. Speakers routinely monitored their outputs to ensure that they were saying what they wanted to. When errors were detected, students interrupted their speech almost immediately and began editing their output. Five types of repair have been identified in the study:reformulation, replacement, false start, repetition and hesitation.The study also found that most of the participants thought in both Chinese and English but to different degrees. Students resorted to their mother tongue to help them generate ideas, retrieve linguistic forms, check for comprehension or keep their train of thought. When students' exposure to the information was in English, or when they wanted to produce some formulaic speeches, they would tend to think in English.When students had problems in expressing themselves, they would use a range of communication strategies:restructuring, stalling, lexical repetition, tonicity, literal translation, approximation, topic avoidance, appealing for help, language switch, abandon message and circumlocution. Among these strategies, restructuring and stalling were the most frequently used, while literal translation, approximation and language switch were three least frequently adopted.The influences of language of thought on the oral production are manifested in inhibitions and facilitation. The former appeared mainly in the improper use of vocabulary or some syntactical structures. These errors can be traced back to the negative transfer of mother tongue. From another perspective, mother tongue facilitated students' production to a large extent by helping them brainstorm about topics, recall past experiences, evaluate the organization of the essay, etc.The study concludes that the oral production process is a demonstration of use of language of thought and communication strategies at different stages of planning, monitoring and repairing. It enables us to have a better understanding of the features in the oral production processes of Chinese EFL students. Therefore, it can provide some pedagogical implications for oral English teaching and learning. Teachers should highlight students' communicative competence rather than their testing scores. Students should be more actively responsible for their own learning and grasp every opportunity to practice oral English.