Self-initiated self-repair in STEM students’ English oral presentations: a qualitative-dominant mixed-methods study

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the trouble sources that contributed self-initiated self- repair. In addition, it also explored the repair strategies used by Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) students during English oral presentations at Bahir Dar University, Ethiopia.  The study employed a qualitative-focused mixed-methods design informed by a Conversation  Analytic perspective. The participants were 20 grade 11 students, and six presentations were selected for detailed analysis. The selected recordings comprised 69 minutes of public speech data. The researchers recorded, transcribed and coded, and analyzed based on major trouble sources such as lexical, morphological, and syntactic. In addition, the data were analyzed based on the four repair strategies: replacement, repetition, insertion, and abandonment. Both researchers independently coded the transcripts, producing an inter-coder agreement rate of 91.66%. Qualitative analysis constituted the primary analytical procedure, while frequencies and percentages were used descriptively to summarize the identified patterns. The analysis identified 1,274 utterances and 518 instances of self- initiated self-repair. Lexical trouble sources were the most frequent, accounting for 224 cases (43.2%), followed by morphological trouble sources with 178 cases (34.4%), and syntactic trouble sources with 116 cases (22.4%). Among the repair strategies, replacement occurred most frequently, with 186 cases (35.9%), followed by repetition with 126 cases (24.3%), insertion with 115 cases (22.2%), and abandonment with 91 cases (17.6%). The qualitative extracts demonstrate that learners used self-repair to modify lexical choices, grammatical forms, sentence structures, and emerging formulations while maintaining the continuity of their presentations. The findings show that self-initiated self-repair constituted an important resource for monitoring and managing spoken English during oral presentation. However, because the study did not compare STEM and non-STEM learners, the observed repair patterns are interpreted as practices documented among STEM participants rather than as effects caused by the STEM disciplinary context.