Discourse Structure and the Perception of Incoherence in International Teaching Assistants' Spoken Discourse

Abstract

Work by discourse analysts shows that listeners' interpretation of discourse is determined not only by a speaker's pronunciation and grammar but also by discourse-level patterns of language use. To date, relatively little is known about the discourse-level patterns typically found in the English of nonnative speakers, how they diverge from discourse produced by native speakers, or how differences in nonnative discourse patterns affect native English listeners' understanding of the discourse. Using a qualitative discourse-analytic framework, this paper compares the planned spoken English of a native speaker of Chinese whose English discourse was perceived by native speakers of English as difficult to follow with that of a native speaker of U.S. English. The analyses reveal a variety of differences in the use of discourse structuring devices, specifically in the areas of lexical discourse markers, lexical specificity, and syntactic incorporation. It is argued that these differences in discourse-level patterns interfere with the listeners' ability to construct a coherent interpretation of the Chinese speaker's discourse.