A Corpus-based Study On Repair In ESL Learners' Conversation

As a newly developed area, researches on repair phenomenon have been thriving since the 1970s. In spite of disputed theories and researches, there is a growing consensus among the researchers concerning the significance of the role played by repair organization in conversation. On the basis of the theories proposed by Schegloff, Jefferson,Sacks and Levelt etc., this dissertation explores the repair phenomenon in Chinese advanced ESL learners'conversation. The classification of repair organization is based on the theory of Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks in the process of identifying and colleting the repairs in the corpus. And due to the distinct objective of the present study, the original classifications of self-repair by Levelt, Van Hest, Kormos, Chen and Pu are synthesized and adapted by the author to analyze the collected repairs.The research questions of the present study are as follows:⑴Which repair patterns are more likely to be used in Chinese advanced ESL learners'conversation?⑵What are the features of these repair patterns?The research method used in the present study is corpus-based method. Firstly, the data of the present study comes from 100 samples of two-person conversation randomly chosen from SECCL, sub-corpus of SWECCL, total 60, 335 words and 400 minutes. Then in the pilot study, effective methods of identifying and collecting repairs are explored. In a repair organization trouble source move and repair move are various and irregular while there are some discourse markers carrying certain linguistic features in initiation move, therefore if these discourse markers are searched, the repairs in the corpus will be found. In the corpus, these regular repairs have been picked up with the help of the computer software Wordsmith 4.0 and those irregular repairs with repetitions as their initiation moves are found manually, 2,405 repairs have been identified and collected. After the search results are checked carefully and these searched repairs are marked by a set of tags, the analysis of repair are conducted.The research questions have been solved by the quantitatively and qualitatively combined analysis:(1) Symmetric conversations between Chinese advanced ESL learners still adhere to the preference for self-repair: SISR occupies an extremely large part (92.6%) and OISR holds 5.11% while SIOR (1.41%) and OIOR (0.87%) have a very low frequency.(2) Within the self-repair patterns covert repair (60.94%) outnumbers overt repair (39.06%): within covert repair, one word repetition (56.91%) show the highest corporation and the percentage of more than two words repetition(9.92%) is the lowest; and in terms of overt repair which has been labeled as repair of meaning, different information repair and appropriateness repair show a higher percentage(59.37%) than error repair which refers to repair of form(40.63%). And by investigating the above results in self-repair in these ESL learners'conversation, this dissertation seeks to contribute to the discussion of the characteristics of self-repair patterns by L2 learners.In the end of this dissertation, findings of the present study provide some implications for ESL and TESL: during the process of learning or teaching the second language, besides the understanding of the significance of repair ability, the instruction on repair strategies is necessary. The limitations of the present study and tentative suggestions for further studies are proposed.