Using a qualitative discourse-analytic framework, this paper compares the planned spoken English of a native speaker of Chinese, whose English discourse was perceived to be hard to follow, with a native speaker of U.S. English. Differences in the use of lexical discourse markers, lexical specificity, and syntactic incorporation are discussed. (34…

An examination of the planned and unplanned production of 24 nonnative-speaking teaching assistants indicates that there is a greater difference between the 2 conditions in the degree of discourse marking than in grammatical accuracy. Findings suggest that explicit marking is a crucial element in the comprehensibility of nonnative-speaker…