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Original Research Article | Open Access | Peer Reviewed
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A Contrastive Analysis of Disfluency Patterns and Repair Strategies between American Native and Jordanian Non-Native Speakers of English
Eman Ali
Hana Sharar
Aya Al-Zagha
Abstract
The present study is concerned with analyzing the occurrences of disfluencies identified in twenty-two interviews with
Jordanian EFL learners and American native speakers of English. The analyzed disfluencies include repetitions,
prolongations, filled pauses, overt repairs, unretracted false starts and unfinished words. This study further investigates the
frequency of the types of repair strategies that the participants use to correct detected errors and modify utterances that do
not convey intended messages. The results show that there is no marked difference in the percentages of disfluency
occurrences in the native and non-native interviews. Moreover,despite the observed similarities between the two groups of
participants in terms of the frequency of the different types of disfluencies, the resultsindicatethat there are a number of
differences. For example, the interviews with the native speakers were observed to exhibit significantly a higherpercentage
of filled pauses, whereas their non-native counterparts were found to employ higher percentages of repetitions and overt
repairs. Furthermore, employing significantly higher percentages of error repairs by non-native participants and focusing
on repeating single rather than several words are other examples of the analyzed differences. These differences reflect the
non-native participants’ lower levels of English language proficiency which results in concentrating on repairing the errors
that occur at lower levels of processing while neglecting the repairs that might enrich the propositional content of their
messages.
Hana Sharar
Aya Al-Zagha
Full Text: PDF |
DOI: https://doi.org/10.30845/ijhss.vol15p6
Article History:
Received: 10 February 2025 | Accepted: 6 March
2025 | Published: 23 March 2025
Reviewer(s):
Mark J. R. Wakefield, CETAPS-FLUP / University of Aveiro, Portugal; ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3069-8310.
Email: [email protected] Soheil Atashian, University of Nizwa, Department of Foreign Languages, College of Arts and Sciences, Nizwa, Oman; ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8592-8902.
Email: [email protected]
Email: [email protected] Soheil Atashian, University of Nizwa, Department of Foreign Languages, College of Arts and Sciences, Nizwa, Oman; ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8592-8902.
Email: [email protected]
Address for Correspondence:
Eman Ali, Associate Professor in Linguistics, Al-Isra University, Amman,
Jordan.
[email protected]
[email protected]
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