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Applied Linguistics 1999 20(3):293-315; doi:10.1093/applin/20.3.293
© 1999 by Oxford University Press
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Inexplicitness: What is it and should we be teaching it?

W Cheng and M Warren

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hunghom, Hong Kong, China. E-mail: egwcheng@polyu.edu.hk

An invaluable resource to a speaker is the context in which he/she is speaking and failure to utilize it fully will result in the conversation displaying an unnecessary and inappropriate level of explicitness, or failing to reach an adequate level of intelligibility. Using a corpus of native speaker and non-native speaker conversations, it is shown that a characteristic of non-native speakers' spoken language is the inappropriate level of inexplicitness used and the ways in which inexplicitness is manifested in the discourse. Additional factors such as repetition linguistic competence, cultural schemata, and L1 transfer also contribute to the different levels of inexplicitness in non-native conversational utterances. Suggestions are made as to how we might help our students to acquire and practise and skills and techniques required to achieve a more appropriate level of inexplicitness in their spoken English.


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Y.-A. Lee
Towards Respecification of Communicative Competence: Condition of L2 Instruction or its Objective?
Applied Linguistics, September 1, 2006; 27(3): 349 - 376.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


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