The Effects Of Gender Differences On Self-repair In Non-English Majors’ Spoken English

Spoken language plays a dominant role in human communication, and spokenEnglish competence will directly affect the communicative competence andcommunicative effect. With higher demands for English talents and development ofEnglish teaching, improving students’ speaking and listening competence becomes thefocus of English teaching. Spoken English gets unprecedented attention in recentyears. Speakers make erroneous or inappropriate expressions every now and then.They may spontaneously correct errors or modify inappropriate information in theirown speech. Such modification results in self-repair, one of the most significant traitsin spoken language (Van Hest,1996). Self-repair as a common phenomenon instudents’ spoken English has aroused the concern of many researchers.The study of self-repair originated in the work by Schegloff et al.(1977) whowere the first researchers to put forward the term ‘self-repair’. Later on moreresearchers and psycho-linguists have devoted to the research of self-repair.Levelt(1983), the most representative researcher during this period, formulated thefamous monitoring model. He developed the Perceptual Loop Theory of Monitoringwhich shed light on the underlying reasons for self-repair and laid solid foundation onfurther researches. These studies in L1and L2investigate the internal mechanism ofself-repair from a psycho-linguistic perspective. The universality of self-repair and itssignificance in language acquisition determine that it is quite necessary to make acomprehensive study of this topic.Though studies abroad of self-repair have gained fruitful results, studies at homeon this issue are far from enough. A number of researches have studied the factors thatare related to self-repair, but no clear comment has been reached in the relevancebetween self-repair behaviors and gender differences. Therefore, the present studyaims to explore two questions: the characteristics of the subjects’ self-repair and therelevance between self-repair and subjects’ gender differences. With the purpose ofanswering the research questions above, a total of150subjects, including75malesand75females, who are non-English major first-year students from Shandong Normal University are intentionally chosen. In the experiment, these students arerequired to describe a picture and speak on one of the five given topics. The recordeddata was carefully transcribed and analyzed after the experiment.The results reveal that the male group and female group show differentcharacteristics of self-repair in their output, which means that gender has a greatimpact on the students’ choice of priority of their focus while they are deliveringspeech. Male students are more uncertain about their output, thus they have to employmore repetition or E-repair to confirm or reaffirm in order to seek more correctness.Female students employed more A-repairs in their expressions. The result indicatesthat female students, in order to convey message, allocated more attention to theappropriateness of their expression, while male students focused more on linguisticforms.Study of self-repair will help us better understand the nature of monitoringmechanism as well as spoken language output. Researches indicate that self-repair canlead to comprehensive output, which is an important factor revealing the success oflanguage learning as well as a measure of success for L2learning. It also hasimportant implications for English teaching. Teachers should be aware of thisdifference and guide students with different sexuality according to the characteristicsof self repair. English teachers should help the students overcome the weakness interms of gender differences and make up the insufficiency in order to effectivelyimprove students’ oral English proficiency.