A Study On Self-repair In High School Students' Spoken English

English is the most important tool for communication in the world. With more and more close exchanges between countries, China has a continually increasing requirement for foreign language, especially English. People are eager to improve their oral English and directly use English to communicate with outside world, exchange information and deal with business negotiations. Therefore, how to effectively improve the learners'oral proficiency has become a crucial problem in English teaching. This problem has been greatly concerned and discussed for a long time, but not been still solved effectively.The term "repair" was first proposed by E. A. Scheloff et al. in 1977. His investigation revealed that self-repair was the most common type of repairs, and has been used with priority in the process of conversation. Later, self-repair gradually became an important subject of discourse researches. In recent years, the research in self-repair has become the hot issue of second language acquisition researches. Self-repair is an obvious phenomenon in spoken English, and one main feature of spoken English. The studies of self-repair can make us well understand the nature of spoken language. Many researchers think self-repair is an important tool of producing comprehensive speech output. They also find that self-repair is an important factor indicating language learning. It can reflect the speakers'language development. Studies abroad on self-repair have gained some corresponding results whereas studies at home on this issue are far from enough. Until recent years, some domestic researchers have begun to show their interests in this topic. But there are some limitations in their studies. Empirical studies are rare and on a small scale. The subjects of their studies are only limited to the college students. Many of them ignore the psychological mechanism of self-repair and leave covert self-repair out of consideration. In a word, the universality and the significance of self-repair show that it is necessary to have a comprehensive study of this issue.Based on existing theories of self-repair research, this paper chooses high school students as subjects and researches their consciousnesses of using self-repair strategies by questionnaires, makes them retell stories. Besides, the author also makes classroom observations for them. All these aim to find out the characteristics of self-repairs used by high school students, the differences in using self-repair between high level and low level learners, the contents of their repair.The findings of this study are mainly the following two points. Firstly, high school students have self-repair behaviors, and have a higher frequency of self-repair, of which error repair accounts for the largest proportion, with fewer percentages of different information repair and appropriateness repair. Secondly, learners with different language proficiency levels have different consciousness of using self-repair strategies, and directly influence their self-repair behaviors. This kind of difference embodies in the types, contents and structures of self-repair.Based on the above results, the researcher proposes that teachers should devote attention to the phenomenon of self-repair in students'oral production. Furthermore, four practical implications are offered to English teachers.