Compensatory discourse strategies in the bilingual university classroom

Abstract

Contrastive Discourse Analysis operates in a boundary area where linguistics and psychology overlap. Systematic analysis of classroom and academic discourse can enhance approaches to public discourse, including those dealing with the communicative content rather than the form of texts. Such is the context of the bilingual discourse in the university classroom. This study takes a sequenced and multi-methodological approach to analyse, first, the errors in spoken performance in the bilingual classroom; second, the impact of these errors on overall intelligibility. The sample is taken from academic discourse and is comprised of 34 hours of spoken interaction with eight different Spanish speakers teaching through English. The findings show that compensatory discourse strategies, including listener comprehension, impacted communication much more than the errors detracted from it.