The Self-repairs Initiation Devices And Their Functions In Chinese English Majors’ Oral Production

Human oral speech requires impromptu planning and on-the-spot adjustment, which gives rise to frequent self-repairs. As an essential way to eliminate misunderstanding and facilitate communication, self-repairs have been proved as one of the most significant characteristics of human spoken languages. The studies on self-repair behaviors give an insight into the monitoring system of learners’ speech production process and reveal the problems in their interlanguage. Previous researchers have studied different aspects of self-repairs, including their structure, classification and the inner mechanism etc., the relationship between self-repair behaviors and variables like language proficiency, gender difference and task types has also received some research attention.When it comes to the devices speakers employ to initiate their self-repairs, though scholars have acknowledged their potential of affecting the overall fluency and comprehensibility of human speech, yet no systematic study has been conducted and corpus-based research targeting at the L2 learners are especially rare. The present research, based on the Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SECCL), examines the self-repairs initiation devices utilized by 30 female Chinese English majors in the TEM-4 oral test. It is hoped that the study can give a detailed description of the learners’ self-repairs initiation behaviors and reveal their language problems. Specifically, the following three research questions are addressed:(1) What devices do the Chinese English majors employ to initiate self-repairs?(2) What are the features of the learners’ use of such devices?(3) What functions do the devices serve in the learners’ oral production?Through a corpus-based analysis, findings are generated as follows:First, there are in total five types of initiation devices used by Chinese English majors:discourse markers, filled pauses, inseparable initiators, silent pauses and sound stretch. There is not so much difference in the types of devices native speakers and L2 learners use to initiate their self-repairs. Second, there are some features shown in the way the devices are employed. In terms of the overall distribution of the devices, it is discovered that the learners tend to use non-lexical initiators far more than lexical ones. The inseparable initiators are the most employed while discourse markers are noticeably underused by the learners compared with native speakers. In terms of the specific features of individual devices, learners tend to overuse "I think", "maybe", and underuse "well" to ignite their repairs due to pragmatic overgeneralization and fossilization. What’ more, the inseparable initiators are preferred in error repairs rather than appropriateness repairs or different information repairs. Third, repairs initiators serve two major cognitive functions:to gain time for language planning and to mark the linguistic boundary. In terms of the pragmatic functions, initiators can be used to negate the trouble source, to signal the refinement of the original talk, and to clarify the referent of certain utterances. In brief, the choice of initiators is affected by factors like language proficiency, trouble types and situational anxiety.The findings of the present study shed some light on the EFL studies:generally speaking, teachers need to show more tolerance and patience for students’ self-repair behaviors, seeing them as opportunities for discovering their language problems. Moreover, teachers should advocate the use of discourse markers to initiate self-repairs and keep an eye on the fossilized use of certain initiators at the same time.