Cognitive Interpretation Over Productive Mechanisms Of Self-repairs In Oral English

The present study examines the productive mechanisms of self-repairs in Chinesecollege students’ oral English. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods areadopted in investigating the characteristics of self-repairs produced by Chinese EFLlearners.Self-repairs are the behaviors speakers made spontaneously to correct errors ormodify inappropriate productions in their own speech. They are very important indicatorsof oral fluency. From the retrospective comments collected, it is found that self-repairsproduced by subjects have common features: all of them can be divided into two maintypes, namely, conceptual self-repairs and grammatical self-repairs, and they distributedifferently in EFL learners of low and high proficiency. Conceptual self-repairs are madeon the completeness, accuracy and expressiveness of the original concepts, andgrammatical self-repairs are made on grammatical and syntactic errors. The thesis holdsthat conceptual blending hierarchy theory can explain the productive mechanisms ofself-repairs. Conceptual self-repairs are the results of first-order blending, and grammaticalself-repairs are the results of second-order blending. Cognitive integrations at these twolevels are inevitable and coexist in self-repairing process, and this is the cognitive reasonof the two types of self-repairs found in both groups of low and high proficiency.Meanwhile, statistics on the texts collected suggest that no significant difference isfound in the rate of self-repairs (per100words); in which significant difference exists inconceptual self-repairs between the two groups but not in grammatical self-repairs. It isassumed the reason of the significant difference between the two groups in conceptualself-repairs lies in the difference of their attention allocation. During real-time production, the amount of attention speakers allocating to monitoring per unit time is limited, and EFLlearners of high proficiency can allocate their attention resource more reasonably toconcept construction and language expression while EFL learners of low proficiency haveto pay more attention than the high-proficiency ones to express concepts, which results inan inadequate amount of attention that can be allocated reasonably.The conclusion of the thesis is: self-repairs produced by Chinese EFL learners areaffected by conceptual hierarchical blending objectively, but if cognitive subjects canallocate their attention resources reasonably, erroneous productions can be reduced andoral fluency improved.