Discourse and the Non-Native English Speaker By Michael Cribb

which specify accurately the meaning the speaker intended to convey; that is, utterances which avoid ambiguity and vagueness. In day-to-day interactional talk, non-native speakers can overcome this obstacle due to the collaborative (Clark, 1996) nature of the communicative context, where turns are short and opportunities for negotiation with the native interlocutor are relatively frequent. In this type of talk, the native interlocutors’ turns act like ‘pegs’ on which non-natives can ‘hang’ their discourse. When the situation requires the non-native speaker to produce more extended turns in the form of short monologues with less interruption from the interlocutor, however, the added burden of packaging and contextualising utterances into a coherent discourse means that the ambiguity in the utterances is often compounded. This can lead to a loss in coherence, and if this is severe, the discourse may become so disturbed that it can no longer be tolerated by the listener (Bublitz & Lenk, 1999).

While day-to-day interactional talk is often taken to be the prototypical discourse act, it can be argued that extended transactional discourse, where one speaker is the primary giver of information (Berry, 1981), carries value and significance, particularly in academic and professional environments where non-native speakers are often called on to produce short monologues through discussions, debates, presentations, interviews, and so forth. These discourse acts can be evaluated and graded by tutors, managers, or peers, and often carry more ‘weight’ than day-to-day talk; hence, the value and significance that is attached to them. Paradoxically, though, many language classrooms still emphasise academic oracy through production skills at the sentence level of grammar more than production at the discourse level. A contrary situation can be observed in academic written literacy, however, where the production of extended discourse in the form of essays, reports, and summaries, for example, is the norm rather than, say, ‘texting’ or ‘instant messaging’.

As an introduction to the type of extended discourse under discussion here, consider example 1.1, which is taken from an oral proficiency interview with a Korean student of English who was working for a construction company at the time. ¹ Because of the situation (an interview), there is less opportunity for the native interlocutor to negotiate with the