Analysis Of Speech Error In SWECCL At The Morphological And Syntactical Levels

Speech error is a long-standing phenomenon in oral communication. It can be readily found in various languages and cultural backgrounds. Particularly, Chinese students have made quite a few of them. As a result, scholars both home and abroad have paid much attention to speech errors.However, it is a pity that seldom concern has been shown for the speech errors at the higher levels besides the phonetic level. It is very possible that the speech errors at morphological and syntactical levels are also made based on common knowledge and daily speech monitoring. This paper is mainly in an attempt to carry out a study to provide related research of speech error at the morphological and syntactical levels in verbal communication. It will give a brief account of speech error types at the two levels, characteristics and underlying interpretation.The paper is chiefly made up of the following parts:To start with, it will give a brief review of the speech errors at the phonetic level to provide a basic discussion for further analysis of those speech errors at the morphological and syntactic levels. Secondly, the author will present the final result after an examination of every single text and audio file in SWECCL to find new types of speech errors. Thirdly, it will try to find the plausible causes and explanations for each new type from the point of view of linguistic theories and try to offer some corresponding strategies to tackle the problem.In particular, the second part deserves some attention. This part consists of several components that are relatively new and distinctive. First, the preparation work will be presented. Carroll’s classification of speech errors are selected compared with other methods. However the eight types can not cover all aspects as research goes by. As a result, a combination of common English knowledge and certain study findings in Chinese speech errors are employed to get a well-rounded solid theoretical support. Second, TASK1(story retelling) in TEM4recorded in SWECCL are specifically chosen to detect speech error at the levels of morpheme and syntactic since it is comparatively stable and less flexible. Third, researchers mark possible speech errors while listening to the corresponding audio files. At last, a statistic calculation is done to find the speech errors at large, especially the ones that are made at the morphological and syntactical levels.The findings of the paper could be summarized as following:(1) Carroll’s classification of eight types of speech errors at the phonetic level is still in effect at the levels of morpheme and syntactic.(2) The most frequently made speech errors are gender reference---he (she)&his (her) and vise versa and speech fillers such as er...mm..(3) Speech error can be found in every aspect---nouns, verbs, adjectives, possessive pronouns, articles, prepositions and even conjunctions.(4) Speech error occurs at different parts or locations in a sentence. That is to say, it can be found at the beginning part, the middle part, and the ending part.(5) Some distinctive features of English cause troubles to EFL learners. This includes grammatical errors, fixed collocation, attributive clause, tense, words with multiple part of speech and so on.(6) There might be more than one speech error in one single sentence.(7) Incorrect or inaccurate pronunciation and similar-pronounced words enhance the possibility of a speech error.(8) Another highly-made speech error is resulted from the speaker’s self-correction or to be specifically, self-monitoring.(9) The interference of the mother tongue can not be neglected. It can also cause severe troubles to EFL learners. (10) Several other new types of speech error at the levels of morpheme and syntactic can be summarized as Avoidance (of the unknown), Simultaneous production, Repetition and Ignorance.This study will hopefully verify the hypothesis:Through more than20years’ study and development, Chinese EFL learners’speech error is still not uncommon, especially at the morphological and syntactical levels. We need to further probe into the question to enhance Chinese EFL learners’English competence and decrease speech error.Although the paper orients the study of Chinese EFL learners and there may be some aspects that the author has not thoroughly taken care of, the author hopes that the results and findings of this paper could bring practical value and meanings to English learning and teaching.