Repetition As A Self-repair Strategy In Chinese EFL Classroom

Repetition, the consecutive usage of the same quasi-lexical or lexical item or items, has been extensively examined by researchers in various fields, including socialists, psychologists, linguists and conversation analysts, but most of their researches are based on the analysis of native language. With the development of the second and foreign language teaching theories, the role of repetition in foreign language classroom has aroused the interest of some scholars, who have studied it from various perspectives, such as behaviorist, cognitive, functional and socio-affective perspectives. Their focus, however, is on the rhetorical function of repetition, and not many studies examine repetition as a self-repair strategy. It is evident that repetition as a self-repair strategy (when repetition's function is to gain planning time for the speaker or to postpone the possible transition relevance place) has not been given its due attention.In order to study this phenomenon, we adopt conversation analysis (CA) as the research method to investigate repetition as a self-repair strategy employed by Chinese college students in English class. The study is mainly concerned with forms and causes of repetition used as a self-repair strategy, the relevance between them, repetition times and effectiveness. It also intends to indicate the special function and the pedagogical significance of repetition as a self-repair strategy in college English class.With the help of seven teachers, we collecte and transcribe 24 hours' data respectively from three classes of the first and second year non-English majors in 2004 Wuhan University Summer International English Training Program and three classes of the natural second-year college English classrooms.Close observations of the data show that the pattern of repetition as a self-repair strategy has five levels, namely phonetic repetition, morphological repetition, word repetition, phrase repetition and clause repetition. The common feature of them is thatbetween the first and the second saying of the repeated part, there may be inserted by non-lexical elements, pauses, lengthened sounds, quasi-lexical items, or different lexical items usually with cut-offs. The primary function of repetition as a self-repair strategy is to delay the production of the next lexical item or items so that a speaker has an opportunity to hold floor at a possible transition-relevance place and to have enough time to engage in linguistic and cognitive planning. The study also reveals an imbalanced distribution of repetition as a self-repair strategy on the five levels and within each level, and provides the corresponding reasons.The study then reports on the repeating times, which range from once, twice and three times. Hesitation strategies other than repetition, the combination of several hesitation strategies and the possible teachers' interruption could reduce the times of self-repair repetition to less than three times. Besides, there exists a negative correlation between the repeating times and their successful elicitation of the next linguistic unit, which indicates that too much repetition as a self-repair strategy is not effective but nervousness-oriented.We think students' wide use of repetition as a self-repair strategy is determined by special subjects, conversation structures, pragmatic rules, psycholinguistic and socio-affective factors, and is closely related to repairing, communicative, interactive and cognitive functions of repetition as a self-repair strategy for the students in EFL classroom. Some pedagogical implications are also available for English teaching, such as teachers' better prediction of students' linguistic and cognitive difficulties and the revelation of pedagogic blind spots and the demand of various treatments and sufficient patience for different kinds of repetition.The current study only analyzes features of repetition as a self-repair strategy displayed on five basic linguistic levels within the context of Chinese college English class, failing to offer an insightful explanation from social and cognitive perspectives. Further investigations, on the basis of this study, will be more fruitful in the future.