The Effect Of Oral Tasks On Chinese EFL Learners' Self-repair Behaviors

The study is an investigation of thirty female second-year university students taking the oral test of TEM4 with the purpose of answering whether there is a relationship between oral tasks and Chinese EFL learners' self-repair behaviors.Data will be collected from Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners2.0 published by foreign language teaching and researching press in December 1st,2008. Two types of oral tasks will be utilized:retelling and role-playing. Those students whose performances are ranked one are selected as the data of investigation in order to avoid the interference of language proficiency.Levelt (1989)'s Perceptual Loop Theory is taken as the rationale in the classification of different kinds of self-repairs as different repair, error repair and appropriateness repair. Error repair is further divided by four categories, phonological error repair, lexical error repair, syntactic error repair and morphological error repair. What's more, according to van Hest (1996)'s classification, appropriateness repair is divided into two categories:appropriateness replacement repair and appropriateness insertion repair.In terms of the structures of self-repairs distinguished by Levelt (1989), self-repairs are classified into instant repairing, anticipatory retracing and fresh starts.By taking paired-samples test, the following conclusions can be made:(1) There exists a significant relationship between oral tasks and Chinese EFL learners' self-repair behaviors from the aspects of frequency, distribution and structure of self-repairs.(2) On the whole, Chinese EFL learners tend to make use of more self-repairs under the retelling task than under the role-playing task. From the aspect of the distribution of self-repairs, it can be seen that more E-repairs and A-repairs are made under the retelling task while more D-repairs are utilized under the role-playing task.(3) Under the two tasks there exists a significant difference in the structure of self-repairs. The number of anticipatory retracing and instant repairing is almost twice under the retelling task than that under the role-playing task, whereas the number of fresh starts is almost the same under the two tasks.This study can help the teaching and learning of oral English at home and may shed some lights on the similar study of other languages.