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Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Self-repairs have been the subject of investigation in a number of research areas, notably psycholinguistics and conversation analysis. This study has aimed at the examination of self-repairs in second language classroom presentations. Specifically, it has sought to gain insight into self-repairs in naturally occurring talk and to explicate the possible relationships between the variables of age, sex, and educational background and self-repair behaviour of L2 speakers as well as the possible link between self-repair and proficiency. Accomplishing these required a scrutiny of individual self-repairs and their classification. However, the classifications which have traditionally been used in the psycholinguistic approach suffer from a number of shortcomings, as they are usually based on the analysis of surface forms of self-repairs. Because of the subjectivity involved in this process, there has been considerable variation in terms of classes of self-repairs and also the decision as to where a given self-repair belongs. An in-depth analysis of self-repair data revealed that self-repairs do cluster into categories. This analysis also yielded a set of features which are relevant to the study of self-repairs. In addition to showing that the established categories are mutually exclusive, comparison of major categories of self-repairs according to these features, which characterise the trajectory of self-repairs, resulted in the explication of a number of regularities in the way L2 speakers carry out self-repairs. Having established a data-driven classification of repairs, an attempt was made to see whether learner variables of age, sex and educational background have any significant effect on self-repairs. It turned out that none of these variables have a significant effect on self-repairs. In addition, it became clear that while beginning, intermediate, and advanced L2 speakers have been shown to demonstrate significant proficiency-related differences, these differences fade away when they come from the same proficiency level.

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Education. / The Thai government has proposed education reform programs to be competitive with its neighbours and globally. One major policy is to improve competency in English. Thailand has a long history of importing approaches for teaching English from western countries. For a complex variety of reasons the structural-based approaches have been the most influential ones on both teachers and bureaucrats. While these approaches enable Thais to communicate at the basic level, emphasising spoken language, they do not provide systematic guidance to write extended texts effectively. Thai educators have tended to import approaches literally without adequately researching the practicality and suitability of them. This thesis is an attempt to explore whether it is possible to adapt a recently evolved, western 'genre-based' approach to the teaching of English in Thailand. The research focuses on factual English writing because it is highly valued in government, commerce and industry. English and Thai rhetorical patterns differ significantly so students need to write their texts to meet English readers' expectations. To achieve this, students need to be taught to write explicitly. Soundly based in Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the genre-based approach teaches writing at whole text, paragraph and clause levels. It is concerned with realising appropriate generic structure for the different social communication tasks. This approach has the potential to improve Thai students' writing ability. The research project was primarily an ethnographic-case study that was carried out with the co-operation of 45 third year English major students for 14 weeks (from October, 1997 to February, 1998) at the Department of Foreign Languages, Khon Kaen University in northeast Thailand. It is centred on the Exposition genre because some Thai educators had noted that it was one of the most neglected in the Thai educational system, but one of the most valuable genres in western culture. The research outcomes showed that the genre-based approach had a significant positive impact on students' factual writing, showing gains in the control of generic structure and language features of the Exposition. Nevertheless, the research suggests that for the genre-based approach to be successfully implemented in a foreign language context such as Thai, a number of modifications are necessary. The genre-based approach provides students with insights into cultural expectations of writing in English and has the potential to contribute to the policy goals of the Thai government for the upgrading of English teaching and also contribute to its wish of achieving the education refonn agenda.

While various studies have investigated the effectiveness of certain types of error treatment methods, there has been little linguistic research conducted to examine how actual language teachers have been dealing with L2 learners’ written errors. The current research was designed to investigate the types of written errors ESL teachers corrected and the types of error treatment methods they used to correct those errors in the context of Bond University on the Cold Coast. Moreover, it was intended to highlight the relationship between the literature and actual practice in terms of error treatment of written work. In this study, sixty-six students’ written texts corrected by nine different teachers were collected and examined. The teachers’ treatment of the learner errors found in each sample were identified and classified according to their features. The findings from both quantitative and qualitative data on the patterns of error treatment were analysed, and following this, various comparisons were made. The results of the study indicated that despite the current trend of language teaching, error treatment was frequently provided by the teachers in the ESL classrooms. Moreover, the teachers constantly corrected the deviations of local aspects of the language, which did not seriously influence the intelligibility. In addition, the results of the study also demonstrated that the teachers used both explicit types and implicit types of correction methods in a hybrid manner, and they altered their mode of correction depending on the types of errors. They tended to provide explicit correction for wrong vocabulary and sentence construction errors whereas other surface features, such as grammatical and mechanical errors were generally highlighted with implicit correction, especially with correction codes. The findings of this study suggest that increasing the use of less-time consuming error treatment methods for rule-governed lexical errors and educating learners to be able to carry out self-correction could reduce the teachers’ burden of written error treatment. Moreover, constant information exchange would allow the teachers to revise, refine and change their ways to deal with errors. Until clear effectiveness of certain patterns of error treatment is proven by further studies, these suggestions could be made in order to maximise the benefits of the teachers’ treatment of written errors.