The effect of discourse structuring devices on listener perceptions of coherence in non‐native university teacher's spoken discourse

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This paper addresses some of the sources of communication difficulty in the academic context through a discourse analytic examination of videotaped teaching demonstrations by 18 Korean and Chinese teaching assistants. It has been suggested that the primary source of listener perceptions of disorganization in spoken academic discourse might be the overall order in which information is presented. This study, however, reveals that rhetorical organization was not the problem. Research on native speakers’ discourse in an academic environment has indicated that effective communicators use a number of devices to orient their listeners to the relative importance among ideas within the discourse, and simultaneously to convey the interrelationships among these ideas. In particular, we find extensive use of prosody. Native speakers also use a variety of syntactic constructions such as topicalization in order to focus the attention of the listener and show relative foregrounding and backgrounding. Use of these devices provides native‐speaker listeners with a set of cues which allow them to construct coherence. This study shows these cues were absent in the Chinese and Korean speakers. The main structuring devices were lexical repetition and parataxis. In effect, the Chinese and Korean speakers are constructing an undifferentiated, flat discourse structure within which the native‐speaker listener is unable to perceive the intended relationships among the ideas presented.