Associate Professor, English, NC College of Engineering, Israna (Panipat) Haryana
Online published on 20 June, 2013.
The present study gives important insights into the kind of Self-Corrections or online processing that is done by the learners in a written test. Self-Corrections are a reflection of the on-line processing while performing a task; and the degree of seriousness for focus on accuracy of expression the subjects try to achieve. The instances of self-correction from Levelt (1989) in the context of first language acquisition are given below:
Right-further to the right (expansion for exactness)
To the left side of the purple disc is a v-horizontal line (the word vertical intercepted)
What things are this kid-is this kid going to say incorrectly? (agreement)
Why it is-why is it that nobody makes a decent toilet seat? (ordering)
A unut– unit from the yellow dot (phonology)
From my prosOdic – proSodic colleagues (phonology)
Some of the instances of Self-Corrections from our study are:
Change of Plan: Arundhati Roy never attracted so much – attracted masses; In brief – The story talks about
Exactness of Expression: Is this will –decision will lead; from – right from
Grammatical: Life is a wheels-wheel; even an – a venerated person; Ravi Shankar was – is
The data analysis reveals a total of 1297 instances of self-correction across the 15 speakers. This is a clear indication of the high on-line processing that goes on in the written performance of learners. Most of them are successful self-corrections and even the nature of self correction is interesting.
The theoretical basis for the study is from W. J. M Levelt (1989) on `Speaking: From Intention to Articulation’; Varalakshmi (1993 & 1996) on `Monitoring and Self-Monitoring in Speech Performance’; and R. Ellis (2005) on `Analysing Learner Language’.
