Iranian EFL Learners Favored Strategic Fillers for Noticed Gaps amid Conversations Across Proficiency

This study main purpose was to elicit speaking strategies employed by Iranian Learners of English across proficiency whilst they noticed a gap/hole in their inter language repertoire amid a conversation compensating for their lack of fluent speaking ability. Therefore, initially 30 EFL learners, at different levels of proficiency, participated in the first phase of the study. Based on the EFL learners' elicited viewpoints, both via group and one-on-one interviews, a 25-item speaking strategy questionnaire was developed and subsequently, distributed amongst 156 EFL learners to fill out. In order to decide on a subset of frequent responses and eliminate the redundant ones, factor analysis was applied and 6 components were extracted. The components fell on a continuum of noticing the gap, noticing the hole and noticing the gap/hole strategies. This representation unfolded speaking gap fillers strategies. In addition One-way Kruskal-Wallis was run in order to determine the effect of proficiency levels on speaking strategy use. The outcome revealed a significant difference on language strategy use across proficiency.