A Corpus-based Study Of Self-repair In English Majors' Spoken English

The linearity and timeliness of spoken language decide that self-repair is a common feature in oral production.Self-repair refers to the speaker monitoring errors or inappropriateness in speech,and then modifies them.The study on self-repair can increase our understanding of the nature of language,and provide theoretical implication for English teaching.Taking Levelt's monitoring theory and other related theories as the theoretical guidance,the thesis aims at probing into the overall features of self-repair in Chinese English majors' output and the relationship between self-repair and English proficiency.The data in this study are drawn from Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners(SECCL 1.0),in which 210 samples of three different levels are chosen from the oral material of TEM 4 oral test task 2 in the years of 2001 and 2002.Based on the classification standards of Levelt(1983),Van Hest(1996),Ma Dongmei(2012)with minor modifications,self-repair in the selected texts were annotated and analyzed.The main points are as follows:Firstly,this thesis analyzed the general features of self-repair from two aspects: frequency and distribution.In frequency,Chinese English majors produce high-frequency self-repair in oral production(9.59 self-repair every 100 words).In distribution,pause repair(56.12%),repetition repair(12.43%)and pause + repetition repair(12.28%)took up higher percentage,while pause + appropriateness(0.21%)and appropriateness repair(0.14%)had lower percentage.The results imply that the repair strategies used by Chinese English majors lack diversity,and Chinese students focus on language form and give scant attention to high-level pragmatic appropriateness.Lexical error repair and one word repetition are the most commonly used subtypes of error repair and repetition repair,which reveals that Chinese English majors are sensitive to lexical accuracy.Secondly,there is a correlation between the self-repair behavior and English proficiency.From the frequency,learners at intermediate proficiency make the most self-repair(2368),and students of low proficiency use 1938 self-repair and advanced learners produce 1995 self-repair.From the distribution,the results of one-way ANOVA display that,all the rest nine types of self-repair are significant differences except different information repair,appropriateness repair and pause + appropriateness repair.The analysis of subtypes of repetition repair,error repair and appropriateness repair shows that the middle-level subjects make significantly more lexical repair(lexical error repair and lexical search repair)and appropriateness repair than the high and low proficiency subjects.The results indicate that middle-level students may have lower level of automatic extracting second language conceptualization,and less capable of monitoring oral production.The findings of the research offer feedback and theoretical guidance for Chinese English teaching.Specifically,the usage of self-repair by Chinese students reflects their weak and strong points in speech learning,and teachers can adjust teaching strategies based on it to enhance the teaching effectiveness.Meanwhile,teachers should help students internalize English knowledge as well as enhance the capacity of automatic extraction of English conception,so as to improve students' spoken English.