Gender Differences In Self-repair Behaviors Of English Major Students

Self-repair behaviors mean that speakers will correct errors, unintended forms or misunderstandings when they detect that the output is erroneous or inappropriate during speech production and can serve as the evidence of the speakers'oral competence. The present study aims to investigate the influence of gender differences on Chinese students'speech production through analyzing the self-repair behaviors of second-year English major students from Yanshan University, Hebei Province. The premise of the study has been based on speech production model, gender differences in language use summarized by some sociolinguists, Automaticity theory (AT) and communicative strategies (CSs). In present study the following issues are addressed: (1) Do self-repair behaviors have relevance to gender differences? (2) Do female students exhibit more self-repair behaviors than male ones in speech production or is it the other way around? (3) What about the specific relevance between each sub-category of self-repair behaviors and gender differences?A case study is employed to carry out the present research. There are 8 male and 8 female second-year English majors from Foreign Languages College, Yanshan University in the present study. In the study, these students are required to retell a story in English according to pictures provided. All the speech production from the subjects is recorded. In line with the specific classification system proposed by Levelt and van Hest, the transcribed data is classified, analyzed and discussed.The results then show that self-repair behaviors have a close relevance to gender differences. On the whole, female students exhibit more self-repair behaviors in their speech production compared with male students. Female students and male ones have distinctive features concerning the sub-categories of self-repair behaviors, error repairs (E-repairs) and appropriateness repairs (A-repairs). Male students employ more self-repair behaviors at the level of E-repairs, especially focus on morphological error repairs (EM repairs) and phonological error repairs (EF repairs) while female students do more at the level of A-repairs especially concentrate on appropriateness lexical repairs (AL repairs). It suggests that male students pay more attention to form instead of content so that they speak less fluently and less informatively while female students attach greater importance to conveying message instead of being formal thus they speak more fluently and more informatively.The present study has great realistic implications: it is contributory to comprehension of the whole speech production process especially of the monitoring process; it can reflect speakers'automatic language level and their oral competence; it can enrich the further study of sociolinguistics, pragmatics and SLA; moreover, it can exert an important function of enlightenment on foreign language teaching. That is, oral English teachers should fully realize the respective features of self-repair behaviors employed by female students and male ones and guide students effectively according to the differences in order to improve their communicative proficiency and output ability.