Iraqi EFL learners' command of sociocultural norms of English conversation

Abstract EN

The current study investigates Iraqi EFL learners' command in terms of appropriate employment of sociocultural norms of English conversation.

The sample of the study has been selected from fourth-year students, Department of English, College of Education for Humanities, University of Mosul for the academic year 2019-2020.

The sociocultural norms accounted for are conversational openings, turn-taking, backchannels, adjacency pairs, repairs and conversational closings which includes both pre-closing and leave-taking.

The researcher deploys a role-play test to elicit the required data.

Conversation analysis approach serves as the model for collecting and transcribing the data.

Further, the study adopts Al-Hadeedy's (2019) model to evaluate students' performance for the role-play scenarios.

The model has been slightly modified to suit the research questions.

Then, T test is applied for statistical treatment.

The result of the study indicates that the majority of the students are not employing the majority of the sociocultural norms appropriately which refutes the posed hypothesis.