| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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This question will be answered through a textual analysis of a corpus of non-native texts taken from the IELTS speaking test. This is an internationally recognised test of English which produces extended discourse that is highly relevant to students of English in academic and professional environments. The textual analysis will examine the discourse to provide measures of coherence and to identify the type, distribution, and severity of miscues that contribute to disturbances in coherence. This analysis will consider the variation in these measures due to language proficiency and discourse type.
The evaluative part of the study will attempt to answer the following broad research question:
This question will be addressed through a manipulation exercise in which discourse miscues will be repaired and presented to a panel of native judges to determine if coherence is improved. The exercise will attempt to determine the degree to which the miscues need to be manipulated in order to make significant improvements in coherence. In addition, the influence that fluency of speech has on coherence will also be investigated.
Structure of the book
The structure of the book is as follows. In chapter 2, I will present the theoretical background and a review of the past studies. The theoretical background will look at the notion of coherence and produce a working definition of this construct. Within this section, there will also be a brief discussion of the notion of fluency. The review of past studies will look at textual approaches as well as evaluative approaches, including the error gravity studies and the manipulation studies. A description of the design features of the present study, together with the main research questions,