A Study On The Features Of Self-repair In Chinese Middle School Students’ Spoken English

Self-repair means that speakers spontaneously modify or correct their erroneous or inappropriate oral production.It is the most frequent type of repairs and has been prioritized in all types of repair.The study of self-repair can help us have a better understanding of the nature of oral speech and learners’ language learning condition.Through a corpus-based research method,this study makes a research on the self-repair made by 347 Chinese middle school students from the SCCBLE(Spoken Corpus of Chinese Beginner Learners of English).According to the learning time in middle school,six grades students are divided into three groups representing three language learning stages.It aims to make a comparative analysis on the self-repair made by Chinese middle school students in terms of frequency,distribution pattern and significant differences in use.This study attempts to answer the following two research questions:(1)What are the similarities of self-repair used by Chinese middle school L2 students?(2)What are the differences of self-repair used by Chinese middle school L2 students?(1)For the similarities,the frequency of self-repair used by the three groups of middle school students is higher than native speakers’ while it is lower than advanced English learners’.(2)And all the three groups have the same distribution pattern,that is covert repair,namely S-repair,is the largest.Within overt repairs,E-repair occupies the largest proportion followed by A-repair and D-repair.Specifically,grammatical error repair ranks the first followed by lexical error repair.This reveals that the language automation level of middle school learners are quite low,resulting in quantities of repetition and simple errors.(3)For the differences,S-repair is significantly decreasing with the increase of the language proficiency,especially SR-repair,OR-repair and MWR-repair.Moreover,ME-repair is significantly overused in the second learning stage compared with that in the third learning stage.However,there is no significant difference in the use of D-repair and A-repair among the three learning stages.This reveals that subjects in this study still focus much attention on E-repair rather than A-repair,which means that they tend to pay much attention to the form of the language rather than the content and discourse level due to their limited automaticity of language.The findings have practical significance for the study of middle school L2 learners oral production.Through the observation of self-repair,English teachers could have a more holistic view of students language level and their current oral English situation.In the future English class,teachers should pay more attention to the reading class and the speaking class,making students notice the content and appropriateness of the production.In addition,teachers should improve their teaching methods in speaking class,giving students more opportunities to practice and applying various tasks to improve their communicative abilities.