The effect of speaker variables on the self-correction behaviour of L2 learners

Abstract The paper aims to explore the effect of individual speaking style on the self-correction behaviour of L2 speakers. The project reported in the paper involved 30 Hungarian learners of English of varying levels of proficiency and made use of self-report data. The results obtained from the analysis of a wide range of variables did not support the assumptions of previous studies as the difference between accuracy- and fluency-centred speakers did not manifest itself in the global frequency of self-repairs. The two types of learners were found to differ in how frequently they produced rephrasing-repairs, which involve uncertainty about the correctness of their utterance, in the proportion of the errors they corrected, and in the speed with which they uttered their message. The findings suggest that accuracy-centred participants tended to pay more attention to monitoring at the expense of the other speech production processes, while fluency-centred learners allocated more attention to speedy production and focused less on intercepting errors. The paper also points out that L2 learners with differing speech habits may make conscious decisions not to correct an error with varying frequency.