A Corpus-based Study On Repair Sequences In EFL Classroom Conversation

The structure of repair sequences in classroom conversation has been the focus for second or foreign language teachers or researchers, that is: trouble source, trigger and repair. The present study will, based on Swain' modified comprehensible output hypothesis, study how the structure of repair sequences affect students' producing modified comprehensible output. The research questions are: 1) In China's English classroom conversation, which repair patterns are more likely to be used and which repair patters are more likely to lead the students to produce more modified comprehensible output? 2) In teachers initiated repair sequences, what are the relationships among students' linguistic errors, teachers' feedback and modified comprehensible output? 3) How do the findings of the above two questions reflect in the 3 leveled classroom conversation (primary school, middle school and senior middle school level)?The present study is a corpus-based approach, corpus-based studies rely on computer, but computer can only identify linguistic forms.It is a new project to pick out the meaningful sequencesby computer. The thesis has chosen 30 classes from the three times of national qualified English classroom teaching competition as its research data (10 from primary school, 10 from junior middle school and 10 from senior middle school teaching). It has picked out 405 repair sequences through a set of corpus-based methods. The main methods are that first, based on the previous studies, establish the models and framework to analyze repair sequences; then, randomly choose 6 lessons as sub-corpus to do a pilot study to conclude the search words and use the search words to do searching in the large scale of corpus to pick out the repair sequences. For those sequences which do not contain search words, The present study use lemmatization and word clusters function of Wordsmith Tools to pick them out. After picking out the sequences, further marking have been done for error types (repair of meaning and repair of form),types of errors of linguistic form (grammatical lexical, phonological errors), feedback types (negotiation of form, recast and explicit correction), repair patterns (self-initiated self repair, self initiated other repair, other initiated self repair and other initiated other repair), students' modified output.The findings of the present study indicate that among the four repair patterns (SISR, SIOR, OIOR, OISR), except for that SIORs occupy a very small part (3.3%), the other three repair patterns do not differ significantly. The results showed that language proficiency affected the using of repair patterns: the primary school classes prefer to use OIORs';the junior middle school classes tend to use OISRs and the senior middle school classes prefer to use SISRs. The statistic analysis indicated that SISRs and OISRs leaded the students to produce more MCOs. The present study argued that the repair patterns used in the classes reflected the teachers' role as mediators.When teachers initiate repairs, teachers noticed more errors of linguistic forms (83.5%). The teachers in three levels of classes preferred to use negotiation of form to follow lexical and phonological errors. The findings of the present study showed that negotiation of form following lexical and phonological errors pushed the students to produce more MCOs than the other two corrective feedback types (recast and explicit correction). The teachers did not prefer to use negotiation to follow grammatical errors. The primary school teachers preferred to use explicit correction and the senior middle school teachers preferred to use recast after grammatical errors. The junior middle school teachers did not have any preferred feedback types after grammatical errors. The present study argued that the nature of the errors and the teaching goals of the different levels of classes affected the teachers' choosing of feedback types and the teachers' feedback types affected the students' producing of MCOs.Findings of the present study provide some pedag...