A Study On Self-repair In Chinese College Students' Spoken English

Self-repair means a speaker spontaneously corrects the errors or modifies the inappropriate information in his/her own speech. It is quite a common phenomenon in spoken language that the study of it can help us know better the nature of spoken language. Researchers regard self-repair as a useful tool to produce more comprehensible output and an important factor indicating language learning. Studies abroad have gained fruitful results. But researchers at home have only begun to show their interests in this topic until recent years. So it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive study of this issue. The present study aims to investigate the characteristics of Chinese English learners'self-repair as well as the relationship between self-repair and language proficiency.Levelt's Perceptual Loop Theory of Monitoring is an important theory for explaining the psychological mechanism of self-repair. It is developed on the basis of speech model. The speech model consists of five major components: conceptualizer, formulator, articulator, audition and speech comprehension system. According to this model, the speech processing is modular and the monitoring work is done by the conceptualizer. Monitoring can control production process, detect errors and initiate repairs. Self-repair is the overt manifestation of self-monitoring. This theory is necessary but not enough to explain self-repair. It should be completed with theory of attention. Attention is an important cognitive mechanism. The degree of attentional control influences speakers'ability to detect errors.60 English majors in Jilin University participate in this study. According to their OTEM4 scores, they are divided into two groups: the higher level group and the lower level group. Their oral data are collected by three different types of tasks: story-retelling, narrative and conversation role-playing. Self-repairs in their oral data are picked out and transcribed. The transcription is then analyzed.The analysis of frequency shows that the subjects have a high rate of self-repair. The lower level group make more overt self-repair than the higher level group. But the two groups make more or less the same number of repetition. The analysis of distribution indicates that the lower level group make more error-repair than the higher level group, while the latter make more appropriateness-repair and different-information-repair. The lower level group produce more repairs about basic language rules whereas the higher level group focus on repairs about content and discourse. In a word, there is a shift from simple repair to more complex repair as the subjects'language proficiency advances. Correlation analysis confirms this finding. This study also finds that task characteristics can influence the distribution of self-repair. In Task 1 and Task 2, error-repair accounts for a high percentage, while in Task 3, appropriateness-repair increases.English teachers should have a correct attitude towards students'self-repair. They can offer students time and opportunity to make self-repair, which can help the students'autonomous learning. And they can assign different tasks to students at different levels, which can help the students properly allocate their attention to the aspects of the target language.