The activity of speaking is conducted spontaneously and there is not much time devoted to preplanning and arranging the utterances the speaker intends to deliver. Briefly defined, GAMBITS and routines refer to the words and phrases that facilitate the flow of conversations. As such, one way to help learners acquire oral proficiency is to teach GAMBITS that support the social skills emphasized. The present study aimed to investigate the speaking fluency of Iranian intermediate EFL learners through CONVERSATIONAL GAMBITS and routines. To this end, the subjects of the present study consisted of an experimental group and a control group each containing 30 students who attended listening and speaking classes. To count the frequency of gambit tokens and identify their functions, the recorded data were analyzed utilizing Keller and Warner’s classification of CONVERSATIONAL GAMBITS. The results of the t-test revealed that the experimental group possessed better speaking fluency based on the occurrences of gambit categories. There was a positive correlation between the number of GAMBITS and the scores of fluency test. Evidently, the findings of the present study may have implications for EFL teachers and syllabus designers.

Conversations contain spontaneous use of routine formulas which lets speaker sinteract with each other to express opinions. GAMBITS, as one of these formulas, act as an opening remark and help speakers to maintain the smooth flow of an everyday conversation. The lack of mastery of using GAMBITS in maintaining the conversation leads to breakdowns in speaking. This paper aimed at comparing the use of different categories of GAMBITS by native speakers of English and Persian. To achieve this end, a corpus of 40 hours from Persian Native Speakers (PNSs) and English Native Speakers (ENSs) with an equal number of participants was selected through recordings of conversations from different TV Channels. Following the literature, the frequency of gambit tokens was counted and their functions were classified. Chi-square test revealed significant differences between PNSs and ENSs regarding the occurrences of gambit categories. The findings of this study can have implications for language learners and practitioners in the field. The present research demonstrates to language learners the need for learning gambit expressions as elements to improve the quality of their speaking and also to use the language in meaningful interaction with others.

In a speech community, people utilize their communicative competence which they have acquired from their society as part of their distinctive sociolinguistic identity. They negotiate and share meanings, because they have commonsense knowledge about the world, and have universal practical reasoning. Their commonsense knowledge is embodied in their language. Thus, not only does social life depends on language, but language defines social reality. With practical reasoning, people in a speech community use, appropriately, their commonsense knowledge in different social settings in order to negotiate suprasentential meanings. All of this knowledge is acquired without overt, explicit and intentional training. Proceeding along linguistic ethnography and functional lines, we may attempt to specify just what it means to be a truly successful and competent speaker of a particular language within the framework of a speech community.

Introduction: CONVERSATIONAL repair strategies are among the most important pragmatic skills and are classified under the category of CONVERSATIONAL skills. The importance of these skills has been specifically explored in hearing-impaired or specific language-impaired children who are prone to communicative breakdowns during interactions with others. Speech-language pathologists' knowledge about the CONVERSATIONAL repair strategies (i.e., repetition, revision, addition and cue repair) and their normal application during communicative interactions is at best limited and tentative. The purpose of this study was to investigate and compare these strategies in children with 3, 4 and 5 years of age.Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional research, the employment of CONVERSATIONAL repair strategies were evaluated across 72 speech samples derived from Farsi-speaking children resident in Isfahan-Iran. The subjects were divided into three age groups: 3, 4 and 5 years.Results: The results indicated that revision, cue repair and inappropriate responses had significant correlation with age whereas repetition and addition strategies did not show such relationship. With regard to gender of subjects, revision was the only strategy which was more applied by boys than by girls.Conclusion: Repetition was the most frequently applied strategy in each age group. The employment of revision strategy was more common in younger children and, with increasing age, its application decreased. However, subjects used cue repair more frequently as their age increased. These results were in agreement with study results of foreign researchers.

The Holy Our'an has been revealed in the Arabic language, utilized its linguistic mechanism and at the same time has its own linguistic and non-linguistic peculiarities. As a book of guidance, the Noble Our'an has been sent down to show the way of life to every Muslim, and if its guidelines are followed, to guarantee their life to come. Unfortunately, not all Muslims know the Arabic language to gain access even to its literal meaning. Many of them have to resort to its translations to understand the surface meaning: It is a pity that nearly all these translations suffer from different kinds of shortcomings. Some of these deficiencies are due to overlooking the role that applied linguistics, contrastive linguistics and translation theories play in translating from one language to another. This article is an attempt to shed light on the application of Grice's Conversation Implicature on the processes of understanding the divine message and its rendering into another language.