| Self-repair behaviour, as a major characteristic of oral production, is a type of speech action in communication, during which speakers continuously monitor and check whether they have expressed their intentional meaning (Kormos,1999). This study, based on the existing self-repair theories, established an analytical framework. Self-repairs of30female students with the same oral rank both in retelling and conversational tasks were investigated.Results show that oral task type influences English major’s self-repairs during oral production. To be specific:(1) In terms of types, there exist significant differences between Chinese English majors’ types of self-repairs and oral task type. As a whole, English majors make more self-repairs in the retelling task than in the role-play task. Specifically, they make more different-information repairs and error repairs in the retelling task than in the role-play task with no significance in appropriateness repair, especially the alteration repairs of different-information and lexical repairs and morphological repairs of error repairs.(2) In terms of structures, there exist significant differences between Chinese English majors’structures of self-repairs and task type. In two tasks, learners make the fewest fresh starts and tend to make more instant and anticipatory retracing repairs. And in the retelling task, the number of three types of structures is almost twice than that in the role-play task.The results reflect that cognitive load exerted on speakers by task type influences their monitoring mechanism in oral production and English majors are comparatively weak in language speaking manner, which shed some light on English learning and teaching. |
