| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
|
|
Example 1.1
| CAN YOU DESCRIBE THE GENERAL PROCEDURE WHEN YOUR COMPANY MAKES A BID? | |
| 1 | Yeh, so ? rst we receive the information about the international bid through our overseas branch. |
| 2 | So after receive the information we check and study the information with our cooperation company. |
| 3 | So… is right for us to participating in this project or not. |
| 4 | Choose the project for us to participation in project. |
| 5 | So we have to then- |
| 6 | We call to our branch to buy international bid document. |
| 7 | And after receive the document from our branch we study and prepare for the our proposal. |
| 8 | Within limited date. |
student to resolve misunderstandings, and the student, thus, has to produce not only well-formed utterances, but also has to package these in a logical and coherent manner. Looking first at lines 1–2, the discourse is reasonably well constructed and does not present much of a problem to the native listener. At line 3 however, an utterance is offered which is not well contextualised with regard to the common ground. A phrase such as we have to decide would have shown how the propositional content was to be taken in relation to the preceding discourse. Then a proposition in line 4 similarly is not well grounded, but the content also cannot be fully resolved due in part to the lexical item project, which appears twice and is not well specified. In lines 5–8, the disturbance is righted somewhat, but the discourse lacks a degree of coherence.
The result of this is an extended turn which initially is coherent (lines 1–2), becomes disturbed midsection (lines 3–4), so much so that it can no longer be tolerated, and then lacks coherence to a degree in the final part (lines 5–8). This is very typical of non-native discourse, and the effect on the listener can be likened to a radio station in which the signal is initially clear, but which then suddenly goes out of tune before returning