A Study Of Chinese EFL Learners' Use Of Repetition In Their Oral Narrative Production

This paper is a product-based study on Chinese EFL learners'use of repetition in their monologic narrative talk. To be specific, the present study seeks to extract the patterns of the learners'use of repetition, describes the difference in the use of repetition between higher and lower levels of the learners'oral proficiency and calculates to see whether the use of repetition has any predicting power to learners'oral performance.The materials employed for analysis were 30 sampled cases taken from SECCL, an oral corpus of Chinese learners of English. The sample cases were divided into two groups, higher and lower, according to their scores in the TEM 4 oral test.Data analysis has yielded the following three findings:First of all, on the basis of the identified instances of repetition, Chinese learners'use of repetition is categorized into three types: lexical repetition, co-reference and paraphrase.Secondly, of the three categories, lexical repetition, simple lexical repetition in particular, enjoys the highest frequency of use by Chinese EFL learners, which indicates that the attentional resources of the test-takers are limited, considering the spontaneous nature of the oral production, and as a consequence, lexical variety is most likely to be ignored. In addition, the highest frequency of simple lexical repetition suggests that learners'receptive vocabulary is not proportionate with their productive vocabulary, which may be taken as one of the oral features of the learners'oral production.There are three minor types of co-reference repetition: personal pronoun links, substitution and deixis. Nearly all of the co-reference repetition is calculated as personal pronoun links, suggesting that the learners'talk is not deviated from the topic specified in the test instruction for the reason that the topic is more character-oriented.Of the three major types of repetition, paraphrase is least used. Paraphrase in the present study is sub-divided into three categories: simple mutual, simple partial and complex. Of the three minor types of paraphrase, simple mutual paraphrase accounts for the biggest percentage, implying that the learners are more or less aware of choice of words in their endeavor to characterize their speech with some degree of lexical variety, though such a tendency is not obviously demonstrated in terms of the frequency of use of simple partial paraphrase by the learners.Thirdly, statistical analysis shows that there is significant difference in the density of links in the matrix of repetition between the higher and lower groups. The lower group has both higher density of links and higher proportion of bonds while the higher group has higher type/token ratio, which confirms the claim made earlier that the lower group speakers tend to make the simple and exact repetition and to be deficient in lexical variety. In certain degree, patterns of repetition links may become an indicator to learners'oral proficiency level in a testing context.The findings yielded from the data analysis may have a number of implications. On the one hand, the present study has expanded Hoey's study of cohesion in text. On the other hand, it provides some insights into an overall understanding of Chinese EFL learners'oral features in terms of patterns of lexis. Pedagogically, this study may become an access to the problems underlying the learners'oral production so that L2 teachers could focus on some effective measures to be taken to raise learners'awareness of the lexical problems in their oral production. Further inquiries could be made to investigate the differences in patterns of lexis between L2 learners'writings and utterances.