Competing Criteria in the Comprehensibility of Interlanguage Texts: Order of Information Versus Discourse Miscues

Abstract

This paper sets out to test two compering criteria in judgments of the comprehensibility of second language written discourse: the sequencing of information, and the incorporation of appropriate discourse cueing devices The data for this study were derived from Chinese subjects writing argumentative discourse in English In terms of information sequencing, research suggests that Chinese writers of English exhibit a marked tendency to delay the announcement of discourse topic and, in so doing, violate the requirement in English writing for the early statement of topic The relationship between information sequencing and text comprehensibility is made more opaque by the frequent failure of learners to incorporate in their writing appropriate cueing devices (logical connection, reference, tense and aspect and so forth) to guide the reader through the argument In order to investigate the relative importance of order of information vis a vis miscues on perceptions of text comprehensibility, a number of short (student-generated) texts were each manipulated into four versions: original text, miscues intact/order of information rendered linear, miscues corrected/original order of information, miscues corrected/order of information rendered linear The versions were then rated for clarity by fifty English native-speaker university teachers of content subjects. The findings indicate that the overall effect of miscues is perceived to be a more important contributing factor to text comprehensibility than the ordering of information