A comparison of pragmatic accommodation of nonnative and native speakers in written English

The analysis of 10 edited essays written by freshman native and nonnative speakers of English who are novice, non proficient writers of English indicates that both groups produce approximately the same number and kinds of sentence level deviations from standard written English. At this level the nonnative speakers appear no more ‘foreign’ than do the native speakers. At the discourse level, the nonnative students produce fewer faulty structures, and produce more coherent essays with clearer illocutionary guides for the reader. This analysis indicates that nonnative speakers in a college writing class can certainly profit from instruction focused on developing discourse level strategies that structure coherence overtly and provide obvious illocutionary guides for the reader.