A Minicorpus-based Study Of Disfluent Repetitions In Undergraduate English Majors' Oral Production

Disfluency is common in oral English production,which consists of repetitions.As the main type of disfluency in spontaneous speech,disfluent repetitions are prevailing in oral English.Nowadays,there is no unified framework of disfluency and researches about disfluent repetitions are based on the existing corpora such as COLSEC and SECCL while this paper is on the basis of self-built corpus due to research questions.Furthermore,most researches are aiming at non-English majors' oral production while this paper is exploring disfluent repetitions in undergraduate English majors' oral production.Taking execution-planning model,Clark and Wasow's three hypotheses and the input hypothesis as the theoretical basis,this paper aims at analyzing the general characteristics of disfluent repetitions in oral production,investigating the relationship between each type of disfluent repetitions and exploring the underlying reasons for disfluent repetitions.The questions to be addressed are as follows: 1)What are the characteristics(frequency and type)of English majors' disfluent repetitions in oral production? 2)Is there any difference between each type of disfluent repetitions? If so,what's the relationship between each type of disfluent repetitions? 3)What are the underlying reasons for disfluent repetitions?The present study is based on a minicorpus,whose oral data were drawn from 40 second-year English majors' oral production in North University of China.All the 40 subjects were selected randomly.After transcribing the recorded speech,the written texts were identified and annotated manually by the writer herself.The definition and classification are slightly modified according to Ma Dongmei's research,exploring the main characteristics of disfluent repetitions by comparing oral production between graduate English majors and English native speakers.This research involves quantitative and qualitative analyses.The quantitative part consists of recording and transcribing of a talking on a given topic,manual retrieval and AntConc software retrieval,as well as descriptive analysis and paired samples test with the help of SPSS20.0.The qualitative part is to explore the underlying reasons of disfluent repetitions on the basis of observation and analytic approach of literature.The major findings are as follows:At first,the general characteristics of disfluent repetitions are analyzed in terms of frequency and type.In frequency,word repetition ranks first in the disfluent repetitions and clause/sentence repetition is second largest in number,indicating that the repetitions of words and clauses/sentences are most common in undergraduate English majors' oral production.In type,content words have a larger number than functional words in light of syllable repetition.As for word repetition,the repetitions of pronouns are the largest in number and the following are conjunctions,verbs,nouns,prepositions,articles.With respect to phrase repetition,verb phrase and noun phrase take up a high percentage of phrase repetitions and they are close in number,with preposition phrase repetition following.The repetitions of independent clause are a bit more than dependent clause,revealing that the subjects produce disfluent repetitions when they have problems in cognitive planning and articulatory execution.Moreover,the relationship between each type of disfluent repetitions is investigated.The results of paired samples test suggest that only phrase repetition and clause/sentence repetition do not have significant difference while all of the other types of disfluent repetitions have significant difference between each other,indicating that phrase repetition and clause/sentence repetition are closely related to each.Besides,the relationship is not very correlated between each type,which has its characteristics,which speakers cannot pay little attention on it.In addition,the underlying reasons for disfluent repetitions are discussed.Disfluent repetitions are concerned with speakers' characters and speech habits,as well as cognitive planning and articulation execution of speech.In addition,the complexity,continuity and commitment of the speech have an effect on the production of disfluent repetitions.Besides,speakers with more corpora can reduce disfluent repetitions.Disfluent repetitions usually indicate that speakers have difficulties in oral production,especially during the process of second language acquisition.Besides,disfluent repetitions can be produced as a strategy to keep the speech continuity.As a factor of oral evaluation,English teachers should realize the significance of disfluent repetitions,help students reduce unnecessary disfluent repetitions and improve their self-learning ability.