The Effects Of Different English Proficiency Level, Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety On The Self-repair Of University Students

Self-repair is an integrated part of speech production and also a commonphenomenon in everyday speech both to L2learners or native speakers. Foreignlanguage classroom anxiety, as an affective factor, has been entitled increasingimportance by many researchers for their role in L2learning. Among the four skills ofFL learning, speaking is considered to be the most anxious-provoking one (Aida,1994),and the research of oral anxiety is much concentrated on the effect of oral anxiety onoral performance, less is devoted to the study combined oral anxiety with self-repair. Asto the research of the effect of FL proficiency on self-repair, the result is not alwaysconsistent and there is still room for the study of FL proficiency and self-repair.The present study intends to investigate the effect of English speaking anxiety andEnglish proficiency level on self-repair uses. The questions that will be discussed inpresent study are:1. What’s the general picture of the subjects’s speaking anxiety andself-repair uses.2. Do English proficiency level and English speaking anxiety levelexert significant main effects as well as interactive effects on the total number ofself-repair uses and all of its four subcategories respectively?3. Do English proficiencylevel and English speaking anxiety level exert significant main effects as well asinteractive effects on error-repair subcategories uses respectively?The classification of self-repair in the present study is borrowed directly from TangGuizhen (2007), which is based on the study of Levelt (1983,1989), Van Hest (1996).Repetition-repair is included in the subcategories of self-repair in present study and therest self-repairs are different-repair, appropriate-repair and error-repair. Error-repairconsists of phonetic-repair, lexical-repair and syntactic-repair.The participants in the present study were78students from Chongqing University,consisting of37English major and41non-English major students, which represent highEnglish proficiency level and low proficiency level respectively. Questionnaire isrequired to be answered by all subjects for testing their English speaking anxiety level,and then, their oral performances are recorded with a recorder pen, which later havebeen transcribed for repair counting. The frequency of each subject’s repair is later putinto SPSS for analysis. The respective main effects of English proficiency and speakinganxiety level on self-repairs, as well as the interactive effect of English proficiency andspeaking anxiety level on self-repairs are discussed. The major findings of present research are as follows:English speaking anxiety widely exists among college students.Repetition-repair is the most frequently used self-repair of subjects of all types.English proficiency level exerts great main effect on all the four subcategories ofself-repair uses. It is shown that the higher the subjects English proficiency level is, theless repetition-repair and different-repair will be preferred. However, compared withlower English level students, higher counterparts are seen with more appropriate-repairand error-repair uses.English speaking anxiety level is shown to cause difference on the frequency ofrepetition-repair and appropriate-repair uses, while it has no significant main effects onthe use of different-repair and error-repair. And the result is that the high Englishspeaking anxiety level students will use more repetition-repair than low Englishspeaking anxiety level students do, but as for appropriate-repair, it is the opposite.As to the subcategories of error-repair, it is found that the higher the English levelis, the more syntactic-repairs, the less phonetic-repair will be made. English speakinganxiety level causes no difference in the use of subcategories of error-repair.Both English proficiency level and English speaking anxiety level exert significantmain effects on the total frequency of self-repair uses. It is found that the total numberof self-repair rises with increasingly higher English anxiety level but with increasinglylower English proficiency level.No interactive effect of English speaking anxiety and English proficiency level onall self-repair subcategories is found.