The Effects Of Pre-task Planning Time On Self-repairs For Intermediate And Advanced English Learners In China

Language teachers in their everyday teaching practice frequently observe self-repair behavior of L2 learners in their L2 speech production. The purpose of this study is to investigate how manipulation of different pre-task planning time can have different effects on the frequency, distribution and accuracy of self-repair for Chinese intermediate and advanced L2 learners.This study is divided into four chapters. The first chapter introduces the research questions and hypotheses on the basis of the general depictions of current research about self-repairs and the necessity and importance of this study. Very few empirical studies have been executed to analyze self-repair phenomenon in China. Research to date generally supports the claim that planning in advance has a positive impact on the general language production. But no research has provided a detailed analysis of how self-repair behavior varies with different lengths of planning time. Based on the previous studies, it is hypothesized in this study that the longer the pre-task planning time, the lower is the general frequency of self-repairs for learners at both intermediate and advanced level of proficiency, and that pre-task planning will have no effects on the accuracy of error self-repairs for them. Two limitations in the data analysis are also pointed out in this chapter.The second chapter outlines two main psycholinguistic monitoring theories, that is, editor theories of monitoring and connectionist theories of monitoring, while elaborating Levelt's Perceptual Loop Theory of monitoring, which is taken as the rationale in the classification of different kinds of self-repairs in this study. The relevant previous empirical studies on self-repair are also recounted in this chapter.The third chapter, a core part of this study, introduces research subjects, task topics, apparatus, task conditions and procedures, followed by a detailed presentation and discussion of the experiment results. This study uses the method of monologic oral presentation tasks to investigate the self-repair behavior of Chinese L2 learners at two different levels of proficiency with 3 different lengths of pre-task planning time.The defining measure to distinguish 20 participants is the proficiency level they have attained. Those who have passed CET-4 belonged to the intermediate group, which includes 10 non-English-major sophomores or juniors, while those who have passed TEM-8 are classified as the advanced group, which includes 10 graduate students majoring in English.The major findings reveal that the increase of pre-task planning time does not affect the general frequency of total repairs for the intermediate group. This results from the trade-off effects between the frequency of different information repairs and that of error repairs. The frequency of different information repairs falls significantly with the increase of planning time. The frequencies of repairs of both lexical and syntactic errors rise significantly with planning time. In contrast, the longer the pre-task planning time is given, the lower is the general frequency of total repairs for the advanced group. This is mainly due to the fact that both syntactic error repairs and different information repairs occur less frequently as pre-task planning time increases. The findings suggest that improved fluency is not witnessed in the intermediate group as planning time increases, but that the increase of pre-task planning time strongly improves fluency for the advanced group. The main differences between the two groups also lie in the facts that the accuracy of repairs for both lexical and syntactic errors doesn't increase with planning time in the intermediate group, whereas enhanced accuracy of repairs for both types of errors is found in the advanced group as planning time increases.The last chapter tackles the implications of this study in SLA and L2 pedagogy. The study indicates that there is not much benefit in giving intermediate learners longer time to plan tasks partly because some of them utilize this opportunity to prepa...