A CONVERSATION-PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO EXPLORE TURKISH INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS’ CONCEPTUAL SOCIALIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES

Abstract

The present study explores Turkish international students’ conceptual socialization by examining their social interactions with American speakers to look for the ways they coordinated modes of communication through social and linguistic means. A conversational-pragmatic approach was employed to examine the data coming from the video-recordings of a formal, social event held at a U.S. university. The findings indicated that the Turkish students had almost an equal number of endeavors to establish rapport with the American guests and overlapping speech was one of the strategies they employed for rapport increment. Turkish students overused the speech formulas and situation-bound utterances mostly to express gratitude, while the idioms and phrasal verbs were more common in American speakers’ utterances. The findings provide insights into Turkish students’ conceptual socialization since they socially as well as linguistically demonstrated appropriate behaviors during their conversations with the American guests. While the findings of this study can only be interpreted according to this specific social occasion and might not be generalized to the Turkish students’ socialization in different social contexts within the American culture, the study with its naturalistic data does fill a gap in the literature which has been dominated with classroom contexts and artificial language production tasks.