Abstract
The present study explores second language (L2) learners' use of repetition and repair in regard to their first language (L1) and L2 during their revision of L2 written text. Participants were 24 Japanese university students of English as a foreign language (EFL). This study analyzed repetition and repair by both process- and product-oriented data. Repetition, particularly repetition spoken in English was very commonly used in the processes of revision. Of all changes related to repetitions (N = 250), 169 changes (68 %) were linguistically successful. Furthermore, during revision the participants tended to use L2 repetition frequently as a cognitive means for hypothesis testing or eliciting implicit knowledge, whereas they tended to utilize repetition spoken in their L1 to retrieve L2 explicit knowledge. With regard to linguistic types of text changes related to repetition, sentence-level repetition occurred most frequently, and lexical and morphological repetition followed.
