Presuppositional Rhetorical Information in EST Discourse

This paper examines from a discourse point of view a well-known difficulty in learning a second language: the inability of a learner to comprehend the total discourse in a paragraph even when he may understand all the words in each sentence and/or all of the sentences in that paragraph. This difficulty has become particularly apparent to us from our observations of non-native learners of scientific and technical subject matter in the U.S. Our EST teaching and research into EST discourse have led us to believe that the ability on the part of the experienced native reader of EST to use a kind of presuppositional, or implicit, information is lacking in these second-language learners. We discuss this type of information in terms of implicit rhetorical functions, specifically those functions of definition and classification.