The Study of the Application of Referencing and Substitution in Oral Production of Iranian Intermediate learners

The primary objective of this study was to examine the extent to which Iranian intermediate learners have both accurate referencing and substitution in their oral production at intermediate level. Since referencing and substitution are among the factors that make a speech coherent and are recurrent in conversation regarding the principles of discourse, it is significantly important to be accurately adopted and used by learners. The participants of this study consisted 32 homogenized Iranian intermediate learners whose speeches in the free discussion classes as well as their own classes were recorded, transcribed and analyzed. The total recorded minutes for intermediate classes was 500 minutes. The oral production of the learners was analyzed through frequency count and descriptive statistics in order to demonstrate the learners’ use of referencing and substitutions both grammatically and ungrammatically. The corpus findings unfolded that the learners had a better use of referencing compared to substitutions; however, with respect to the grammaticality of referencing, there were plethora of inaccurate uses of referencing , specifically the ones pertinent to singular and plural references as well the ones which were gender-based. Considering substitution, learners had great inclination of having full formed and substitution-free utterances. Finally, the results were thoroughly discussed and some recommendations for having more accurate adoption and use of referencing and substitutions were presented

Keywords:

Referencing , Substitution , Accuracy , Spoken Discourse Analysis