A Study On Self-repair Development Of English Majors In Oral Production

Self-repair is an integral part of oral production and an important basis for the study of mother tongue and second language production.Researchers regard self-repair as an important tool to produce comprehensible speech production and an important factor indicating language learning.An increasing number of studies on the self-repair of L2 have been conducted both at home and abroad.However,there are few studies on the self-repair development of Chinese EFL learners in oral production.Therefore,it is necessary to conduct a cross-sectional study on the self-repair development.120 university students ranged from Grade 1 to Grade 3 of a university from Jiangxi Province,who represent for three different language levels participated in this study.Their oral data were collected by picture-description task in the laboratory lab and then graded by two postgraduates.The top 20 students in each grade,namely 60 students,were selected as the subjects of the study.Subsequently,the oral production of the 60 subjects was transcribed and the self-repairs were found out.Finally,the self-repairs after transcription were analyzed.The present study,based on corpus analysis,mainly addresses the following three research questions:(1)What is the frequency of self-repair of the three different grades? Is there any difference in the frequency of self-repair of the three different grades?(2)What is the development trend of the types of self-repair of the three different grades?(3)Are the self-repairs related to the subjects' oral performance?Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data,the study finds that: 1)The frequency of self-repair is rather high among the three different grades;There is a significant difference in the frequency of self-repair among the three different grades.2)The 60 subjects from the three different grades focus on same information repair among the four types of self-repair;There is a increase from Grade 1 to Grade 2 while a decrease from Grade 2 to Grade 3 with respect to the frequency of same information repair,error repair and different information repair,and there is a constant increase among the three different grades as for the frequency of appropriateness repair.3)There is a negative correlation between the self-repairs and the subjects' oral performance.In other words,the higher achievements the learners got in the oral test,the less self-repairs they made in their oral production.The results indicate that: 1)The overall language proficiency of English learners is not enough.2)The self-repairs produced by the subjects are influenced by their metalinguistic awareness and language proficiency.3)With the deepening of language learning,learners have mastered more language rules,and after a lot of language practice,they can use the target language more freely and appropriate.On the basis of these findings,English teachers should first further improve the basic language skills of college students,and cultivate some more communicative strategies for students in oral English teaching.Besides,teachers should not overemphasize grammatical accuracy in oral English teaching.What they should do is to seek the best balance between the appropriateness of content,the accuracy of grammar and the fluency of language.Finally,teachers can analyze students' self-repairs to help students to promote their English learning.