Abstract

This study focuses on the evidence of self-repair and analyses the practices of self-repair in naturally occurring conversations in an institution of higher learning between eight students whose mother tongues were not English. The aim of this study is to increase non-native English speakers' attention to both language and the medium's comprehensibility. This study utilized a qualitative method (Creswell, 2014), and content analysis was used to analyse the data. Audio-recorded face-to-face conversations were obtained from eight postgraduate students from one of the public universities in Kuala Lumpur. The data were transcribed using Jefferson's (2004) transcription notation symbols. The data were analysed based on self-repair strategies, which were the lexical, morphological, syntactic, pragmatic, and explicitness strategies (Mauranen, 2006). The findings show the occurrence of self-repair participants applied in enhancing their language fluency to improve their language proficiency and increase the level of explicitness of their language production. The findings further reveal the ways that non-native speakers of English use to improve proficiency and explicitness so that they become more understandable and able to communicate with others in daily life.