A Study On Gender Differences In English Self - Patching Based On Oral Corpus

Self-repair is quite a common phenomenon in oral production. It not only refers to the correction of mistakes and inappropriate output, but also means that speakers detect the dissatisfied expressions in order to communicate with others successfully. Based on oral corpus, the thesis paper addresses the following questions:(1) What are the characteristics in frequency and distribution of self-repair in EFL learners.(2) Testing self-repair is relevant to gender difference.(3) Is there an obvious difference between female and male learners in the use of self-repair. If there is, what are the reasons?Data used in this paper was drawn from Spoken Corpus included in Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(SWECCL,2.0). Sixty male and sixty female samples were randomly selected from oral data of TEM8. Based on Levelt’s(1983) classification of self-repair, the study made a slight modification according to the collected data. Self-repairs were annotated and analyzed with the help of software of PatCount and SPSS(19.0). The findings as follows: Firstly, EFL learners frequently employ self-repairs, especially repeated information repairs, different information repairs and error repairs. In addition, self-repair has a close relevance to gender difference. Through comparative analysis, female learners exhibit more self-repairs compared with male ones and they prefer different information repairs, appropriate repairs and error repairs. In contrast, male students employ more incorrect self-repairs than females. Furthermore, gender variable has a significant influence on the use of selfrepair which reflects in different information repair and incorrect repair.The results help teachers know the differences of language competence between female and male learners, which can offer feedback information and shed new light on English pedagogy as well. Meanwhile, the study of gender difference on self-repair is one of attempts to combine English pedagogy with sociolinguistic field, providing a new research perspective for further study.