A Study On The Relationship Between Self-efficacy And Self-repairs In Oral Production Of Chinese EFL Learners

As one of the most distinctive features of oral production,self-repair behaviors are very common in communication.Since Schegloff et al.(1977)put forward self-repair for the first time,there have been an increasing number of studies on self-repair.Studies on self-repair mainly concentrate on the relationship between self-repairs and other variables.And there is a tendency that more and more researchers begin to investigate the relationship between self-repairs and affective factors,such as anxiety and motivation.However,according to Bandura,self-efficacy is the most important affective factor,because it affects almost everything people do and how they behave,and it can increase the probability of finishing a specific task successfully(Bandura,1999).Therefore,lots of researchers have devoted to studying it.Although there have been a considerable number of studies on self-efficacy,studies on self-efficacy are far from enough in the domain of SLA(Shi,2016).Moreover,few researchers have studied self-repair behaviors from the perspective of self-efficacy.In order to supplement the previous studies,the present study is to explore the relationship between self-efficacy and self-repair behaviors.There are two research questions in this study:(1)Are Chinese EFL learners' self-efficacy and their self-repairs in oral production interrelated? If they are,what is the relationship between them?(2)What differences are there in the three types of self-repairs,namely different information repairs,appropriateness repairs and error repairs,of Chinese EFL learners at different self-efficacy levels? To answer these research questions,the researcher carried out an experiment.119 students of a university in the Northeast of China participated in a questionnaire survey.After measuring their self-efficacy with the questionnaire,60 students were selected as the subjects of this study,including 20 subjects with high self-efficacy,20 subjects with middle self-efficacy and 20 subjects with low self-efficacy.Then there was an oral narrative task for the subjects.The researcher recorded the subjects' oral production for transcription and analysis.At last,a semi-structured interview was carried out to get the ideas of the subjects about the factors that influence Chinese EFL learners' self-efficacy in English learning and their attitudes towards self-repairs.The results of this study show that Chinese EFL learners' self-efficacy and self-repairs are interrelated.And there is a significantly negative correlation between them.Subjects with high self-efficacy produced the fewest self-repairs,while subjects with low self-efficacy produced the most self-repairs.Moreover,self-efficacy influences Chinese EFL learners' distribution of three types of self-repairs.Appropriateness repairs of subjects with high self-efficacy are the most among the three groups,while error repairs and different information repairs of subjects with low self-efficacy are the most among the three groups.And different information repairs,appropriateness repairs as well as error repairs of subjects with middle self-efficacy are all between subjects with high self-efficacy and subjects with low self-efficacy.The findings of the study shed light on second/foreign language teaching.It is important for teachers to help students maintain proper high self-efficacy and lead students to treat self-repair behaviors appropriately.