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Repeats in advanced spoken English of learners with Czech as L1

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2017

Abstract

The article presents results of a study of the use of repeats in advanced learner English and contributes to the study of L2 fluency. The analysed 13 hours of recordings with 50 Czech advanced learners of English revealed 1,905 instances of repeats which mainly (78%) consisted of one-word repeats occurring at the beginning of clauses and constituents.

Two-word repeats were less frequent (19%) but appeared in the same positions within the utterances. Longer repeats are rarer.

A comparison with similar analyses shows that Czech advanced learners of English use repeats in similar ways as advanced learners of English with different L1s and also as native speakers. It appears that these learners successfully adopt the nativelike strategy of using repeats either as a result of exposure to native speech or as transfer from their L1s.

A question remains whether such strategies can become part of L2 instruction. Spoken learner corpora also ought to include samples of the learners' L1 production.