Discourse and the Non-Native English Speaker By Michael Cribb

to a listenable, if somewhat unclear, state. For native interlocutors, this can be a peculiar experience because the discourse appears to mean something but never fully makes sense, and they are never quite sure how they should react. Should they, for example, interrupt as soon as the disturbance manifests itself or wait until the extended turn has finished? If the discourse was part of a presentation, say, the interlocutor might not have the opportunity to interrupt. Moreover, the question as to what feedback a teacher should provide on hearing such a discourse is even more awkward. Most of the miscues in the discourse are ‘covert’, in that they are not obviously represented by deviant surface text, such as grammatical errors. Rather, the miscues are more due to a ‘poverty of expression’ and a lack of meaning, which is not easily resolvable.

The production of extended discourse, therefore, involves the construction of meaningful utterances and the proper contextualisation of these utterances in order that coherence can be maintained. As each successive utterance is articulated, it is added to the common ground and forms part of the context for subsequent utterances. When the utterances are deficient in some way, as seen in example 1.1, then miscues in semantic consistency and pragmatic relevance become apparent, and a meaningful, coherent interpretation of the discourse becomes difficult. These miscues operating at the discourse level accumulate and interact with each other and can lead to the discourse becoming disturbed so much so that it can no longer be tolerated by the listener.

Coherence

The central task, then, for the non-native speaker in producing extended discourse is the production of utterances which enable the listener to create a coherent representation of the text. Coherence, however, has been a difficult notion to pin down despite being widely discussed in the literature. Many scholars have glossed it as a property of a text that enables the sentences to ‘hang together’. This rather vague definition suggests that the native speaker has an intuitive understanding of the notion of coherence, but that academics have found it difficult to characterise the