Planning, Discourse Marking, and the Comprehensibility of International Teaching Assistants

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. In planned production, discourse moves were more likely to be marked overtly and explicitly than in unplanned production, whereas the level of syntactic and morphological errors differed only slightly. This increased marking in the planned condition appeared to contribute significantly to comprehensibility, suggesting that explicit marking of discourse structure is a crucial element of the comprehensibility of nonnative-speaker production.