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.

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.