Discourse Competence — Evidence from Thematic Development in Native and Non-Native Texts

Abstract

This paper explores the concept of discourse competence in the light of academic journal articles written by native and non-native writers of English and native-language writers of Finnish. The aim is to demystify the notion of discourse construction ability and to show that at least some of this is a matter of largely language-specific skills, which constitute an integral part of knowing how to use a language. The logical progression of a text is therefore not a straightforward reflection of a writer's ability of think clearly, but a product of culture and the textual resources of a language. The focus is on theme - rheme progression in texts, and the results indicate that this progression is more difficult to handle in a foreign language than in the mother tongue, even if grammatical errors are ignored. The implications are that we should make allowances for text-level problems just as we do for sentence-level errors in texts written in a foreign language, and in addition, we should develop teaching pratices which enable writers to construct good texts in any language