Abstract
This study employs corpus analytical tools to carry out a systematic study on Chinese Science and Engineering Majors’ (SEMs’) use of self-repair in their oral English. The study aims to find out the overall feature of using self-repair by SEMs and to see if there exists statistically significant difference of using self-repair across different English proficiency level groups. Results show that SEMs use self-repair frequently and they use same information repair (SIR) most. There is no statistically significant difference in the overall frequency of using self-repair among SEMs’ levels. SEMs’ correction rate is rather low. Self-monitor theory and communication strategies theory are used to explain the results. At the end of the thesis, the author provides some suggestions for oral English teaching.
Highlights
Chinese linguists have investigated self-repair behaviors of Chinese learners in their oral English, but they lack related studies on Chinese college students especially in particular majors. 1.2 Significance of the Research The significance of the present study mainly lies in the following aspects: Firstly, the present study focuses on one particular group of English learners, i.e. Chinese Science and Engineering Majors (SEMs), for they occupy the largest proportion in college students in China, which reaches nearly 70% according to the recruiting plan of Ministry of Education (Retrieved August 8, 2011, from http://bbs.eduu.com/thread-307994-1-1.html)
1) In discussions, Chinese Science and Engineering Majors’ (SEMs) frequently make self-repair; there are 4.4 times of self-repair in every minute and 7.5 times of self-repair made by each student
Within same information repair (SIR), one-word repetition repair (ORR) takes up the highest percentage of all
Summary
The researchers have done a lot of study on self-repair behaviors in both first language and second language acquisition fields. Chinese linguists have investigated self-repair behaviors of Chinese learners in their oral English, but they lack related studies on Chinese college students especially in particular majors. The research is to investigate the use of self-repair patterns by Chinese SEMs in oral English, intending to find out their general features of using self-repair patterns from lower English proficiency level to higher one. On the basis of the definition given by Sehegolff et al (1977), Rieger (2003) defines repair as “error correction, the search for a word, and the use of hesitation pauses, lexical, quasi-lexical, or non-lexical pause fillers, immediate lexical changes, false starts, and instantaneous repetitions” (Rieger, 2003, p. 48)
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