Variationist perspective on the role of social variables of gender and familiarity in L2 learners' oral interviews

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of candidates' gender and familiarity with the interviewers on their language variation in oral interviews. For this variationist investigation, 60 university students comprising both males and females were randomly assigned to groups of familiar and unfamiliar with the interviewers. Then, they were interviewed using IELTS interview framework with some modifications.Three linguistic variants, i.e. "to be" contractions, /th/ pronunciations and the use of "he and she" interchangeably were extracted from the data and transcribed for the analysis. Then, they were analyzed using descriptive procedures through tests of frequencies in SPSS software. The results indicated that acquaintanceship with the interviewer might affect speech study of the subjects, the subjects with the unfamiliar interviewer trying to be more formal than the subject with the familiar interviewer.The findings also revealed that candidates' gender affected their use of the speech variants.In fact, the speech styles of males and females were significantly different with the females being more sensitive and conservative with their language behavior in the presence of an unfamiliar interviewer. We can claim that language variation among the candidates is affected by social factors like the sex of interviewees and their familiarity with the interviewers in L2 settings. © 2011 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland.