Local structure of descriptive discourse in the speech of adult learners of Russian as a foreign language

This paper explores the local structure expressed in rhetorical, communicative and narrative relations and speech disfluencies in the descriptive discourse of adult learners of Russian as a foreign language.In the experiment, two learner groups with B1/B2 and C1/C2 levels of proficiency in Russian as a foreign language had to read two descriptive texts and relate their contents to an interested listener.The study contrasts the distribution of local discourse structure in stimuli texts (59 EDUs) and in the speech of experiment participants in two groups (629 EDUs).The results reveal that the speech in C1/C2 group manifests more frequent narrative relation Setting, communicative relation Metadiscourse, rhetorical relation Interpretation.Meanwhile, the speech of B1/B2 group demonstrates the predominance of communicative relation Agreement and rhetorical relation Joint.The most common type of speech disfluency of C1/C2 speakers is Self-correction, whereas for B1/B2 learners this is Repetition.Additionally, as opposed to the rhetorical structure of the stimuli, Joints are used far more frequently in the speech of both groups, which evidences of the problems in rhetorical coherence with both B1/B2 and C1/C2 learners.