Mini-lectures of Chinese native speakers of English: A comparative discourse analysis

Complaints about International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) at U.S. universities have engendered studies of so-called ITA problems since the 1980s. These studies generally have analyzed the problems in comparison with “standard” English native speaker's discourse but rarely investigated cross-linguistic influences on interlanguage discourse. Taking a comparative discourse approach and both qualitative and quantitative analyses, this dissertation research project explores 38 mini-lectures of prospective Chinese native speaker ITAs with respect to global discourse organization structuring and local syntactic structuring. It specifically examines how discourse organization structuring and syntactic complexity are related to overall comprehensibility. In addition, it examines patterns of interlanguage syntactic construction in comparison with both the first and target languages.; Results show that global discourse organization structuring realized by metastatements and conclusions as boundary exchanges is positively correlated with overall comprehensibility, whereas syntactic complexity in the form of three types of finite clauses is not. But qualitative analyses suggest that pervasive phonological errors may also be one of the main factors affecting overall comprehensibility. Results from cross-linguistic analyses of syntactic structuring show that both first and target language rules seem to interact in interlanguage use.; The research findings have valuable theoretical and pedagogical implications. Theoretically, interlanguage as a system needs to be studied on the basis of substantial empirical research applying an updated Contrastive and Error Analysis as its important methods. The current research contributes to second language acquisition theory by its comparative discourse analysis among the native language, interlanguage, and target language. Pedagogically, the findings suggest that second/foreign language teaching be more discourse- and genre-oriented.