This thematic issue on the construction of discourse by nonnative speakers brings together papers from a variety of perspectives. The papers illustrate how our understanding of various aspects of learner language are enriched by viewing them when situated in text. Of the variety of analyses used in this issue, the most well-known to SLA researchers investigates the organization of the text itself and the learners' ability to structure such a text. Other investigations in this issue include the study of grammatical features of interlanguage that contribute to the structure of the text and, conversely, the study of textual features that determine the use of grammatical features: neither of which may be accessible through the analysis of sentence-level production. In addition to grammatical features, the study of lexical development can be enhanced through the study of text. Whereas lexical inventories alone do not reveal the true nature of the learners' lexicon, a study of text reveals not only which lexical items are selected by learners but also how they are employed in discourse. These studies of text extend to other areas of linguistic competence as well. In the study of pragmatic competence, viewing speech acts as they are situated in speech events (e.g., the speech act of recommendation in the speech event of a letter of recommendation) not only contributes to our understanding of how certain acts are realized in context, but also how they contribute to the structure of the discourse. Finally, in the construction of text, speakers and writers must take into account the addressee.

This paper examines the sources of miscommunication in a videotaped tutoring session involving a native speaker of Korean and a native speaker of U.S. English. Analysis revealed an initial nonmutual interpretation of participant role and status. These divergent interpretations appear to have resulted from the Korean tutor's transfer of a Korean conversational routine, which he defined as involving polite speaker modesty, to the U.S. English context. The initial conflicting interpretations are maintained and solidified by additional mismatches in discourse management strategies, schema, and contextualization cues. The cumulative effect of these mismatches was the judgment on the part of each of the interlocutors that the other was uncooperative.

This study investigates learner's construction of oral texts on topics of specialization. Using the framework of the discourse domain hypothesis, which holds that second language proficiency is acquired with reference to individual, specialized contexts of production, termed discourse domains, the study tests the prediction that learners will construct more independent and coherent texts on such topics. Data were elicited from advanced ESL learners at a U.S. university: Discourse domain talk on academic major topics by five invested subjects is compared with the performance of the same subjects on a general topic and with a control group who talked on two comparable general topics. Analysis focuses on discourse organization, including turntaking patterns and episode structure. Results suggest that text construction is facilitated by learners' expertise and investment in the topic of conversation. Invested subjects constructed more coherent episodes and, in some cases, more independent turns on their topics of specialization. In the absence of such expertise, however, recent rehearsal of topics by some control subjects appeared to permit similarly enhanced discourse organization. Thus, the study reveals a complex relationship between specialized knowledge and text construction that suggests new avenues for future research into topic-related interlanguage variation.

This paper presents an empirical study of repetition in expository essays written by 24 nonnative speakers (NNS) and 16 native speakers (NS) of English. Repetition is coded according to three categories: the degree of particular types of repetition, the interaction between instances of repetition, and the location of these interactions (Hoey, 1991). Four quantitative measures devised for this study show no significant differences between the two groups. A qualitative comparison of three essays from each group, however, shows that the NSSs do not match their degree of repetition to the development of the argument structure of the text in the same way as the NSs. These examples from NNS texts show that when considering the significance of repetition the content of what is being repeated is as important as the quantity.

Different expectations for structure and content in the construction of text can lead to difficulties in cross-cultural communication. This study investigates letters of reference as one type of written text that is relatively frequent in the contexts of the international academic community. Sixty-five letters of reference written by American referees and 65 letters written by referees from five Asian cultures were analyzed to discover the conventions and expectations guiding readers and writers from these backgrounds. Although there were many similarities in the two sets of texts, there were also several differences in the structure, content, and implicature employed in the letters; there is a complex interaction between the tripartite conceptual structure of the letters (the introduction, body, and closing) and the occurrence of specific elements of content and the form those elements took.

This paper investigates the occurrence of null objects in a stable nonnative variety of English spoken in Nepal. Previous studies of zero anaphora with second language learners have assumed that advanced learners of English will acquire the native target norms, which highly constrain null object occurrences. This paper shows that in the construction of text speakers of Nepali English may omit both direct and indirect objects in contexts where native speakers may not. Pragmatic principles govern these occurrences although they differ for the two types of objects. Null direct objects are part of discourse topic chains and their referents are recoverable within the text, even across speakers. Null indirect objects, on the other hand, refer primarily to discourse participants and do not generally need textual coreferents. The resultant discourse organization for this variety of English is one that requires greater addressee participation than native English discourse. The paper shows that when learners are confronted with input from two typologically distinct discourse traditions they may develop a third framework that utilizes compatible features for each.

A number of studies on the acquisition of tense and aspect by learners of a second language point to the hypothesis that narrative structure influences the distribution of tense/aspect forms in interlanguage. However, the studies have reported conflicting profiles of tense/aspect use. This study suggests that much of the variation that has been previously reported stems from the level of proficiency of the learners. This crosssectional study examines 37 written and oral narrative pairs produced in a film retell task by adult learners of English as a second language. The analysis approaches the texts from two perspectives, from the perspective of acquisition, taking narrative structure (specifically grounding) as an environment for acquisition of tense/aspect, and from the perspective of the narrative itself, characterizing the foreground and background by the tense/aspect forms used. The study finds a developmental pattern in the distribution of tense/aspect morphology with respect to narrative structure. These results permit the assimilation of earlier findings into a developmental sequence in the acquisition of the tense/aspect system.