The Effects Of Task Type On Self-repair In English Majors' Spoken English

Self-repairs, as recurrent phenomena in everyday speech, are corrections speakers make on their own initiative, without the intervention of interlocutor(van Hest, 1996).Schegoloff et al.(1977) give a definition to self-repair for the first time. With the development of the studies, more and more researchers turn to the researches on self-repair. During this period, the most representative study of self-repair in L1 is carried out by Levelt(1983), who puts forward the monitoring model and the Perceptual Loop Theory of monitoring from the psycholinguistic perspective, which lay down a solid foundation on further researches of self-repair behaviors.In abroad, although studies of self-repair have achieved great achievements, at home studies start late and are far from enough. Besides, numerous studies have been conducted to investigate the factors which affect self-repair, while no clear comment has been reached in the relevance between self-repair and task type. For these reasons, on the basis of the existing theories, this study is conducted to illustrate the following two questions: What are the characteristics of self-repair made by English majors in frequency and distribution? How does the task type influence speakers' self-repair behaviors?In this thesis, data are collected from Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners,in which thirsty female students who participated in the TEM-4 Spoken Test in the year of 2006 and whose performances belong to the same rank are randomly selected.According to the classification given by Levelt(1983) and Kormos(1999) with slightly modifications, self-repair behaviors are identified and noted and then methods of analysis are applied with the help of SPSS software.The results reveal that task type has an effect on English majors' self-repair behaviors. In frequency, students produce more overt repairs in Task1 than in Task3. In distribution, in two tasks, the proportion of E-repair is the highest and then followed by D-repair and A-repair. In structures, students are inclined to use instant repairs and anticipatory repairs.The findings of this study throw light upon English teaching and studying for Chinese teachers and students. As stimulation for autonomous learning, self-repair behaviors need to be encouraged by English teachers in second language teaching andlearning. In addition, it also reflects that the cognitive load impacts on the speakers through different task types affect speakers' monitoring mechanism during oral production. And students are comparatively weak in language speaking manner.