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.

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