A Study Of Oral Self-repair Strategies By Learners Of Chinese As A Foreign Language

In learners'speech, self-repairing is an obvious indicator to the speakers'oral proficiency. The term"repair" was first proposed by E. A. Scheloff et al in 1977. His investigation revealed that self-repair was the most common type of repairs. Later, the research in self-repair became the hot spot of discourse and second language acquisition researches.Although the study of self-repair strategies began over 30 years ago, scanty research is yet to be found in China, especially in teaching Chinese as a foreign language. For that purpose, this research tries to make a theoretical and pedagogical study in this area.Firstly, the study reviews the theoretical literature of self-repair strategies, and focuses on its theoretical framework, including the definitions, various classifications, distribution as well as its relationship with other concepts.Secondly, it makes a quantitative study of the conscious of using self-repair strategy on the basis of the data taken from questionnaires done by more than 150 learners of Chinese as a foreign language in the Overseas Education College of Xiamen University, and from the story-retelling done by 60 Indonesian students of Chinese origin.Based on the results of a quantitative analysis of the questionnaires and story-retelling, the study shows that learners with different language proficiency levels have different consciousness of using self-repair strategy, and perform differently in the types and structures of self-repair. It reveals that self-repair strategies can be greatly influenced by such factors as gender of the learners, but not the tasks or the mother tongue.The findings of this study have pedagogical implications for the teachers. It would help L2 learners to raise their awareness of the gap between their linguistic knowledge and their actual speech production.Lastly, these findings strongly support that learners'self-repair skills could probably be increased by developing their self-repair strategy. The study also provides some suggestions to the training of self-repair in TCFL.