| This thesis reports an exploratory study on the characteristics of self-repair of Chinese English learners'oral production in terms of taxonomy, distribution, and cut-off points of self-repair. It also attempts to probe the relationship between the distributions of both self-repair and cut-off points and task type, as well as the impact of self-repair on the overall quality of oral products.The present study examines 20 English majors, 10 from second year and 10 from fourth year, by means of two oral tasks and a retrospective interview. Detailed analyses of both the qualitative and quantitative data generate findings as follows:1) Four major types of self-repair are identified among self-repairs in the subjects'oral products: D-repair, A-repair, E-repair and R-repair. Students make more E-repairs than any other type of self-repair.2) Students prefer to make E-repair immediately after the problems are detected while delay the D-repair and A-repair. Phonological errors are repaired earlier than lexical or grammatical errors. Besides, the number of delayed cut-off points is negatively related to the overall quality of the oral production.3) Students make more self-repairs, more A-repairs and E-repairs in particular, in Picture Description Task than in Decision Making Task.4) With the increase of L2 proficiency, more self-repairs occur, and the attention of repairs is turned from structural and lexical levels to content and language appropriacy levels. It is also found that more D-repairs and E-repairs negatively affect the quality of L2 oral products while more A-repairs benefit it.In light of these findings, the present thesis has certain value in guiding the teaching of spoken English. Instead of over emphasizing language accuracy of oral production, teachers should instruct the students to avoid making too many error repairs and to allocate more attention to language appropriacy and fluency in order to better the quality of the oral production.
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