Self-Repair in Language Learners’ Oral Discourse

In the present paper, different strategies of self-initiated self-repair in oral productions of L2 learners of Spanish are examined. In order to do self-repair, learners first need to detect a problem and interrupt their speech flow, and then formulate an alternative. In second language acquisition research, language learners’ self-repair in oral discourse is often linked to learners’ proficiency level and their monitoring ability and as such is considered as facilitative of learning. This article is based on a study in the course of which language learners were assigned a story-telling task based on a Spanish TV series. After viewing the video compilation, the participants were asked to retell the story in their own words. The aim of the study was to investigate which kinds of spontaneous self-repair strategies were frequently used by these language learners, which types of problems were mostly noticed and whether detection always lead to an appropriate correction. Finally, it is discussed in what way the self-initiated self-repairs were related to language proficiency in general and learners’ fluency in particular.

ISBN:978-3-942949-11-8

Trefwoorden:Self-initiated self-repair, second language acquisition research, language proficiency, fluency, Spanish as the L2