Effects of Repetition on English Majors’ Oral Proficiency 非流利重复对英语专业学生口语流利度的影响文献综述

 2021-11-04 20:59:59

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1. IntroductionWith the fast growth of science of technology at home and abroad, international communication is increasingly frequent. To begin with, English serves as a tool that Chinese people can use to learn about other countries, as well as demonstrate China to the world. Whats more, as the most widely used language in the world, English is of a progressively significance in communication. Although peoples communicative competence is enhancing, it still cannot meet the needs of social development. There are various kinds of problems in oral English, such as disfluency, which leads to misunderstanding.Disfluency is common in language production (Ma, 2013) and there exists various kinds of disfluencies. People do not always plan and prepare every utterance in advance in everyday communication. When speakers cannot make up a complete utterance at once, they may choose to delay their speech, repair and repeat what they have said. That is when disfluency comes into being(Zheng, 2017).TEM-4, as a standardized test for English majors of comprehensive colleges in China, has an influential say on the measurement of English majors English proficiency. Story retelling is an important and thorny part of TEM-4 Oral Test, which combines students capacity for grammar, vocabulary, expression, content, fluency and intonation (Liu, 2013). Therefore, it can be seen as a tenable measurement of English majors oral proficiency. 1.1 Need for the studyFor a long time, much attention has been paid to the ability of students written English while oral English lacks enough attention. Dumb English is rampant among students. Although many students can get high score in the written test, but in actual English language communication, they cannot speak English fluently. Their spontaneous speech is always full of repetitions.Oral fluency is quintessential to English majors oral proficiency. Story retelling, as an important and difficult part of oral test, sets a higher standard for English majors. Story retelling is a comprehensive skill, which can reflect students comprehensive English level. There exists scores of disfluencies in students language production after the analysis of the corpus of TEM-4 Oral Test.Repetition, as one of disfluencies, usually delivers a message that speakers have difficulties in oral production, especially during the process of second language acquisition. Therefore, repetition holds great importance for studying oral production and evaluating the quality of oral production, with specific reference to second language learners oral communicative competence. Moreover, repetition can be regarded as an indicator of oral English proficiency(Liu, 2013). Thus, a comprehensive study on repetition in English majors oral production can be of great pedagogical importance, which offers practical for information English learning and teaching. 1.2 Research purposeStudies on repetitions yielded critical insight into the nature of English majors characteristics and capability of language use in teaching and evaluating oral English. Previous studies placed great emphasis on the factors that influenced oral proficiency, such as the mental state, knowledge accumulation. However, repetition lacks due attention. Specific studies on repetition include a research on the characteristic of repetition of English postgraduates (Ma, 2013), a study on repetition of disfluent production in second language production (Chen, 2013). However, there is no research on the impact of repetition in the task of storytelling of English majors on oral proficiency. The study is designed to clarify effects of repetition on English majors oral proficiency and put forward relevant suggestions about practical teaching. Specifically speaking, this study is inclusive of two aspects: First, what are characteristics of repetition in language production; Secondly, how to improve English teaching according to these established properties. By doing so, the author hopes to provide some suggestions in order to improve English major oral proficiency. 2. Literature Review2.1 Disfluency2.1.1 Definition of disfluencySpeaking a second language well is not a simple task for most people, even English majors. Sometimes, they are at a loss for the grammar and its usage due to the lack of English proficiency or some other factors. Additionally, they are not so fluent in oral English. It is almost impossible for any speaker to have a perfect plan about what to say and how to say it in his mind before uttering it, which causes disfluency in oral production (Finkler,1997:165).Disfluency is commonly heard in human speech, including different breaks, non-lexical vocables which happens within the speech. These involves wrong starts, i.e. words and sentences that are cut off mid-utterance, phrase that are restarted or repeated and repeated syllables, fillers, i.e. non-lexical utterances such as uh, um and repaired utterances, i.e. correcting lips of the tongue( From Wikipedia).2.1.2 Empirical studies on oral proficiency Systematic research on disfluency had not been carried out until the end of the 20th century. In the view of some scholars, one of the most important characteristics of disfluency is the flow of speech is blocked when it is produced. As Fox Tree(1995) studied the impacts of disfluency on language comprehension, he advised that disfluency did not always hinder understanding, because it depends on the types and places of disfluency. From his perspective, disfluency are generally defined as a phenomenon that interrupt the flow of speech and do not add proposition to an utterance, which includes long pauses, repeated words or phrases, and fillers, i.e. uh and um.Some scholars give definitions of disfluency according to the classification of itsdifferent forms. Shriberg(1994)classifies disfluency into eight categories, including hesitation, pause, fill, repair, wrong starts, repetition, insertion, and slip of the tongue. From is perspective, there is a coincidence between pause and hesitation, and hesitation can be considered as the cause of pause and filling. Insertion, repair, and wrong stars similarly overlaps.2.2 Repetition 2.2.1 Definition of repetitionShirberg (1994) thinks that disfluency belongs to all the speech other than fluent part. Generally speaking, disfluency is defined as a phenomenon which interrupt the flow of speech and do not add any proposition to the utterance. It includes long pauses, repeated words or phrases, restarted sentences, and fillers uh, um (Fox,1993).Bada (2010) defines the term repetition by referring to repeated utterances of Turlish non-native speakers of English and non-native speakers of French which may occur at word, phrase, sentence level.Ma (2013) defines repetition as speech that makes the listener hesitant and produces the same syllable, word, phrase, sentence, or syntactically incomplete word strings one or more times in a row. Repetition may be accompanied by silent pauses, non-lexical or vocabulary fillers. 2.2.2 Empirical studies on repetitionDifferent studies make researches on repetition from different aspects. In general, here are some common classifications of repetition. (1) The language form Repetition occurs not only in phonemes and morphemes, but also in words, phrases, clauses and sentences (Zhang, 2005). Bada (2010) divides the repetition into word-level repetition (WLR) and group-level repetition (GRL) by studying non-native speakers of English and non-native speakers of French on their dub for two movies with no caption. He finds that most repeated elements turn out to be verbs, pronouns, prepositions among NNES, and among NNSF, pronouns, determiners, and verbs. Repetition is made as vocalized fillers and self-repair. Based on Chinese database of International English learners Japanese Corpus and Japanese Corpus of native English speakers, Quan (2012) finds that non-native language learners use repetition more frequently than native ones. Both use subject personal pronouns as repetition starters.(2)The number of repetitionBada (2010) divides repetition into word repetition, group repetition and sentence repetition. Chen (2013) studies repetition in speeches of Chinese English learners, based on the number of repetition. In his opinion, repetition is grouped into one-word repetition, two-word repetition, three-word repetition, four-word repetition, five-word repetition, and six-word repetition. (3)The function of repetitionRepetition, considered as a kind of repair or covert repair in many systems ( Fox, 1993; Shriberg, 1994), can be seen as the same-information repair, which means speakers repeating the information that has been told, including a consonant or a syllable or one word, two words, and more than two words. Dickerson (1971) holds that repetition functions for habitual pause or reducing interruptions following a long pause. Quan (2012) thinks repetition functions as filling and self-repair.2.3 Problems in the previous studiesRepetition is one of major problems in EFL learners language production. Although many researches pay attention to repetition, there are still some problems in exploring repetition.First and foremost, the number of specific studies on repetition is limited. It is known that few domestic researchers study repetition in a comprehensive way(Chen, 2013; Ma, 2013; Yuan Ma, 2013;Yuan Chen, 2017). However, there is no study utilizing the corpus of story retelling, the first part of TEM-4 oral test. The author reckons that TEM-4, as a standardized test for English majors of comprehensive colleges in China, plays a big role in the measurement of their English proficiency. Story retelling, an indispensable part of TEM-4 oral test, reliably strains English majors resources, i.e., their capacity for vocabulary, grammar, fluency and intonation.To conclude, analyzing the corpus of undergraduate English majors TEM-4 oral test, typically story retelling in this paper, can more explicitly reveal the characteristics of English majors oral production. ReferencesBada, E. (2010). Repetitions as vocalized fillers and self-repairs in English and French interlanguages. Journal of pragmatics, 42, 1680-1688.Dickerson, W. (1971). Hesitation phenomena in the spontaneous speech of non-native speakers of English. University of Lllinois, Urbana.Fox Tree, J. (1993). 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