The Spoken Errors and Compensatory Strategies of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Learners in English Debating Processes in One Technological University in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Pi-feng Chiang, 江碧鳳
• Other Authors: Cheng-Ji Lai
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/30191352092451911084

碩士 === 雲林科技大學 === 應用外語系碩士班 === 96 === This study investigated students’ spoken errors and compensatory strategies in an English debate class in the Department of Applied Foreign Languages (DAFL) at a technological university in central Taiwan. In addition, this study also explored the relationships between the types of spoken errors and the types of compensatory strategies. The participants in the present study were 19 students who majored in English and one student who minored in English in the DAFL. Among the twenty students, only two of them were males, and the other eighteen students were all females. Two research methods were adopted in the study. Firstly, error analysis was used as the method to analyze the learners’ spoken errors. Secondly, classroom observations of participants’ debating processes were conducted to analyze the learners’ use of compensatory strategies. In addition, a questionnaire consisting of questions related to the types of compensatory strategies employed by the participants in their debating processes was issued to each individual. Furthermore, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, also known as the K-S test, was performed to investigate the relationships between the five types of spoken errors and the fourteen types of compensatory strategies. The major findings of this study were as follows. Firstly, the results showed that the five types of spoken errors (i.e., grammatical errors, phonological errors, lexical errors, syntactic errors, and semantic errors) were all found in these DAFL learners’ utterances. However, among these five types of spoken errors, the majority of errors were grammatical errors, which may indicate that the DAFL students in this study were still incompetent in applying the English grammatical rules and sentence patterns to form accurate sentences in oral production. Besides, the study results showed that the identifiable categories of spoken errors were also very similar to the results of written errors except for phonological errors. This suggests that students tend to commit the same types of errors no matter it is in oral or written forms. Secondly, the findings showed that the six strategies most frequently-used by these DAFL students in their debating processes included use of fillers, repairing/restructuring, nonlinguistic signals, clarification requests, confirmation checks, and asking for repetition. This shows that the DAFL students were not competent enough in English oral expressions: First, they used a large number of fillers to gain more time to construct the sentences in English. Second, they repaired many times in order to form correct English sentences. Third, they often employed nonverbal means to convey the messages when they did not know how to express their meanings in English. Fourth, they asked the interlocutors to repeat the questions again when they could not comprehend the messages. Lastly, in terms of the relationships between the types of spoken errors and the types of compensatory strategies, the findings indicated that the use of generalization, confirmation checks, and use of all-purpose words were slightly correlated with grammatical errors, but many other compensatory strategies were not found to show significance with the spoken errors. This finding further questions the claim that communication strategies are possible sources of errors, and suggests that further investigation is needed.