Iraqi EFL Learners’ Cultural Schematization: A Cultural Approach to Role Schema and the Learners’ Non-Nativelike Production of Some Official Titles

Non-nativelike expressions were observed in Iraqi EFL learners' oral production during their conversation course as they resorted to literal translation to compensate for their inadequate knowledge of the English lexicon. Their choice of literal equivalents is expected to be a schema-driven selection rather than an arbitrary option. In the case of official titles, for example, learners employed their cultural schematization to conceptualize the contents of the English official titles unaware of its potential difference from the English schematization. This study explores the possible cultural role schemas underlying the Iraqi EFL learners' frequent use of ‘president’ in some English official titles. It seems that various central role schemas are associated with these titles and that there is no particular unified schema behind the recurrence of 'president' in the learners’ oral output. Actually, varieties of schemas interact together; formulating the role schemas and their relevant linguistic instantiations in English and Arabic in light of their natives' thinking styles and ways of perceiving the world.


Introduction
The role of cultural cognition in language patterning has been the concern of a lot of research work ((Keesing1987, Hutchins (1994), Sharifian (2009), (2011),(2017), Hadi (2017).Language as a sort of human behavior is governed by individuals' mental processing of knowledge during interaction across places and times of their existence.While the basic cognitive mechanisms of information processing represented by categorization and schematization are universally the same for all humans, the different data input due to divergent individuals' perceptions leads to the heterogeneous mental representation of information and hence different patterning of languages.Holistic and analytic thinking styles, which are handled in various research themes as the two poles in the cognitive thinking continuum (Nisbett et al. 2001, Lin (2009), Cheng and Zhang (2017), are essential in the relativity of mental representation of the world and consequently of language patterning.Holistic thinking is a property of collective cultures, while analytic thinking is prominent in individualistic cultures.
In collective cultures, individuals are integrated into a cohesive social form and a person is identified in relation to his social group.Dependency is prominent in such cultures as the individual does not detach himself from the group.By contrast, in individualistic cultural communities where the social ties are loose, individuals attend to themselves and their immediate families ,giving priority to their independency (Hofstede et at:2010).The two dimensions of culture projected their influences on its members' thinking and their attention focus.Analytic thinkers develop a part-focus attention processing, while holistic thinkers follow a whole-picture path to information processing (Ford and Chen 2001).This results in dissimilar encoding and decoding of the same world details; a phenomenon that has its salient reflections on Language.Actually, holistic and analytic thinking styles cause differences in the two main mental mechanisms of conceptualization, namely categorization and schematization, which highly govern the shaping of various levels of the Language system.
Categorization involves the classification of stimuli and their related concepts into groups according to similarities or differences among the classified entities (Langlotz:2015).The mental classification may involve any component of the experience, whether it is physical or abstract.This mechanism is highly adapted to the changes that may arise in various situations (Glushko et al.,2008), and it happens basically to allow the perception of as much information about the world as possible with the minimum level of cognitive effort (see Rosch (1978), Littlemore (2009)).
Schematization, the other mechanism of conceptual formation, refers to the process of mental representations of the general knowledge about individuals' experiences and the associations between the attributes of these experiences (Sharifian 2011).These associations are environmentally contingent and activated all the time automatically.The concepts generated accordingly shape individuals' perceptions, judgments, decisions, and behaviors (Shepherd,2011).Schemas are stored as a sort of pre-acquainted knowledge that guides people to behave appropriately in common situations.Actually, when experiences are frequently repeated during human social interaction, the related schemas are abstracted and deeply organized that they become a trajectory for the behaviors of individuals, including their linguistic behavior, in their cultural communities (Taylor and Crocker (1981), Nishida (1999), Sharifian (2014).
While categorization is the classificatory process that allows grouping entities on the basis of similarity in some attributes, the schema is an association-based process that organizes entities in light of the thematic connection observed between them (Sharifian,2011).A detail in the experiential world can be both a category and a schema depending on the kind of mental processing activated in dealing with the available information.Sharifian clarified this notion by showing that the event of 'wedding' is a category as opposed to the event of 'engagement', while 'wedding' as a schema encompasses the details involved in this event, such as "the procedures that need to be followed, the sequence of events, the roles played by various participants and expectations associated with those roles."(Sharifian,2017:15) On the lexical-semantic level of language, it has been stated that every vocabulary has its own underlying schema, which arises in certain contexts of use, and that a word must be defined in terms of its relevant schema (Palmer 1996, Sharifian 2011).This study intends to uncover the role schemas expected to underlie the patterning of some official titles in Iraq; offering some possible theoretical explanations that can answer the set of questions arisen in this study.

Arabic Language and Arabs' Cultural Cognition
Early research work by Arab linguists is a clear indication of their realization that language is a reflection of culture.They devoted their efforts to analyze the everyday language of Arab people, abstract, and record the schemas underlying the component levels of their language.They brilliantly traced every single schema underlying Arabic sounds, alphabets, morphemes, words, syntactic arrangements, grammatical rules and structures, semantic content and meaning extension, etc. AlFarahidi (2003), Sibawayh (1983), and Ibin Jinni (undated) are the pioneers who recorded their theories that language is a simulation of its speakers' cultural cognition.They attributed the difference in dialects, the multiple meanings of words, and the various groupings of sounds and alphabets in their language to the conceptualization of aspects of individuals' experiences within their culture.Aldori (2005) stated that even a tiny difference between two words is an indicator of a purposeful response to the cultural environment of speakers; a proposition which implies the essentiality of schemas in meaning construction.Arabic culture has been described as a collective culture that is characterized by high power distance and low individualism.Members of collective communities adopt the idea that people are existentially unequal, and hence power is centralized in the hands of a few people who constitute a long set of hierarchies within a large system of supervisory staff.In collective communities, bosses are unapproachable and shouldn't be contradicted, and their subordinates should be considerably dependent on them.This is in contrast to individualistic cultures or small power distance communities where consultation between the boss and the subordinates is preferable, and dependency is very limited.(Hofstede (2001),(2011), Hofstede et al (2010).This paper proposes that the nature of thinking and the hierarchical system of relations between members of a cultural group are instantiated in their lexicon.For example, leadership as a universal cultural model compromises categories, schemas, and metaphoric conceptualizations, each of which is highly subjected to cultural filtering that brings some leadership details (rather than others) into focus.As a result, there is no one unified official title used to refer to all individuals in leadership positions in offices and organizations in spite of the fact that they all share the category of leadership.English natives, for example, have a president, a prime minister, a head of department, and a head of committee/ chair of committee.While Arabic natives have ‫رئيس‬ (literal translation: president) and ‫وزراء‬ ‫رئيس‬ (literal translation: president of ministers), and ‫قسم‬ ‫(رئيس‬literal translation: president of department), and ‫لجنة‬ ‫رئيس‬ (literal translation: president of committee).The variations in labeling system within and across cultures is both observable and justifiable due to the various meaning associations evolved in light of cultural idiosyncrasies and thinking styles that govern the relevant conceptual contents across cultures; which is apparently reflected in the lexicons of cultural groups.

Literature Review
Research on cultural schemas and culturally constructed lexicon is a critical area of research work as it has multidisciplinary applications.However, this review intends to shed light on three studies related to communication and the EFL context.Nishida (1999) investigated social schemas for sojourners' intercultural communication, and she extracted eight types of schemas that are essential for non-natives to fulfill successful communication.These schemas are: "Fact-and-concept schemas" (segments of general data about the world's details and facts), "Person schemas" (knowing the different personalities and traits of people), "Self schemas" (how individuals see themselves and others), "Role schemas" (roles expected to be played by occupants of social positions), "Context schemas" (the behavioral parameters that should be appropriate for situations and their relevant settings), "Procedure schemas" (awareness of the sequence of events which best fit common situations), and finally "Strategy schemas"(problem -solving techniques) (757-58).An individual calls the schema that best fits his purpose of communication, and when he is unfamiliar with a particular situation, he tends to selectively direct his attention to his native schema to comprehend the information at hand; which is a sort of adaptation for survival and meeting one's communicative needs.However, miscommunication is possible when an individual fails to adhere to schemas in the target cultural system.Sharifian (2001) explored cultural schema as a source of miscommunication between Australian Aboriginal students and their non-Aboriginal teachers; which negatively affects the students 'educational performance.He challenged the view that the low performance of those students is due to their cognitive or even language deficiency.He noted that the Aboriginals' production of fragments of sentences rather than complete ones is not a sign of lack in their language abilities, but it belongs to their cultural 'minimal verbal processing' strategy of communication where a part of an utterance is sufficient for the Aboriginals to activate the relevant schema required for comprehending the intended message (due to the shared cultural knowledge among their Aboriginal people) that they see the more linguistic expansion unnecessary.Another Aboriginals idiosyncrasy mentioned by Sharifian is the schema based referencing system, where a demonstrative in an Aboriginal text does not have a cataphoric or anaphoric reference because its antecedent is a schema activated in the speaker's mind.Unawareness of cultural knowledge that shapes the individuals' mental processing of information and the schema underlying their linguistic proposition can engage the interlocutors in datadriven processing in contexts that require schema-driven processing or activate the incorrect schema; which impairs communication between teachers and students whose performance deteriorates consequently.Actually, Sharifian's study has important implications for the EFL context in general and for institutions that have people from different cultural backgrounds where languages other than English are actively used, and hence misunderstanding and misinterpretation of messages are highly predictable due to cultural differences.
Sharifian and Tayebi (2017) investigated the role of cultural schema in the perception of impoliteness.The focus of the study was on the Iranian notion of ' taa'rof' which is an essential schema in Iranian culture.'Taa'rof' is related to offering services and goods in a polite manner that involves praise and avoiding genuine opinions (particularly negative ones) to others.The researchers collected the data to be analyzed from the online data, field notes, and etiquette manuals.They also used a three-layered methodology which involved identifying the words that were repeatedly used by participants to describe an act as impolite (metadiscourse analysis), analyzing the scenarios which led to a negative evaluation of some behaviors as impolite (discourse analysis), and uncovering the conceptual relation between perception, evaluation and cultural conceptualization taking into consideration the ethnographical background (conceptual analysis).The study concluded that although schemas are heterogeneously distributed due to a variety of details of the context of interaction, people seem to build their communication on the assumption that they share the same cultural schema, and whenever an individual employs a schema that violates the one expected to be active (by his interlocutor) in some particular social situation, a negative evaluation as being impolite rises.
Research work shows that cultural schemas are influential in the EFL context and for the non-natives who seek successful communication and accurate use of the target language.

Research Questions:
The paper aims to answer the following questions: 1. Is there one cultural role schema underlying Iraqi EFL learners' frequent use of 'president' in their oral production of the English official titles under consideration?
2. How does conceptual analysis explain Iraqi EFL learners' non-nativelike production of these titles?

Methodology
A mixed method of analysis is adopted in this study.First, a quantitative analysis (see Table A) was used to treat the participants' responses statistically to infer relevant conclusions that are expected to be fruitful in answering the questions of this piece of work.Second, a corpus-based analysis is adopted to identify expected "collostructional relations" (Sharifian, 2017:47) between an implied role schema and the linguistic sign representing it in the official titles under investigation.The qualitative analysis involved a conceptual analysis of some titles, particularly those whose Arabic equivalents start with the word ‫:رئيس'‬ president', relying on both principles of cultural linguistics and ethnographic explanation which is based on both the theoretical work in the field and the researcher's knowledge as a cultural insider.

Participants
The Participants in this study (N=66) were Iraqi EFL learners from the first two stages of the undergraduate study/ department of English/ university of Babylon.Conversation is one of their course topics where the learners practise speaking in English.The focus of speaking training is on enhancing fluency by putting one's thoughts in a sequence of utterances while answering questions like (what, why, where, when, etc.) about various topics.None of the participants in this study was bilingual, and they did not receive any lectures on cultural cognition and the role of its mechanisms in the construction of the Language system.

Instrument
The researcher designed a survey instrument on a 6-point Likert scale for uncovering the central schemas' preferences assumed to be underlying the learners' frequent use of 'president' in a set of official English titles.The Likert scale was devised in 1932 to measure attitudes delivered by individuals' preferential feelings, thinking, and actions which are rooted in individuals' cognition during their social interaction (Joshi et al., 2015).The Likert scale for this study consists of two levels.The vertical level lists the following five role schemas (leader, decision maker, authoritarian, representative of a group, and coordinator of events).The horizontal one is a scale for the availability of those roles in occupants of official positions.It includes six degrees ranging from six to one; which are the quantitative values of the qualitative measures (Very frequently, frequently, sometimes, rarely, very rarely, never).

Procedure
The : literal translation: President of Ministers).These five titles were particularly chosen because they are all part of the learners' interactional world and they can be a clear reflection of the influence of collective cultural cognition on EFL learners' schematization; which supports the theoretical analysis of the participant's responses.The participants were asked to respond to the following question "to what extent do you think that the occupant of each of the following positions plays each of the roles listed in the table below?".To respond to this question, a participant had to tick one of these options: (Very frequently, frequently, sometimes, rarely, very rarely, or never).The learners' responses were then collected and treated statistically to infer conclusions.

Results
The table below shows the statistics of the participants' responses: The values of standard deviation for all the items are statistically insignificant.This can be a hint at a collective stance of the participants' agreement concerning each role choice in the questionnaire's items.However, the various mean values calculated for each of the six roles proposed for each title can be a validation of the proposition that cultural cognition is heterogeneously distributed in the minds of the participants, while the highest mean value recorded for some particular role option rather than others can indicate that there's a central view shared by the majority of the participants.This outcome answers the first question in this study.
Another important latent data uncovered by the statistical analysis is that the role schema of a leader, a decision maker, and an authoritarian ranked the top among all other proposed roles for all the official titles in the questionnaire except for the ('chair/head of a committee' : ‫لجن‬ ‫رئيس‬ ‫ة‬ ) where the representative role replaced the authoritarian role.This ranking can be attributed to the notion that each of these roles implies a sort of a high power distance where an individual is seen as being distinguished from others by having a power of some sort; a concept that goes in line with Iraqi EFL learners' mentality as collective thinkers.Roles like a representative of a group, a coordinator, and a supervisor do not imply the far-reaching power that sets a person apart from others.These roles are expected to be more prominent in the team-membership context of the analytic cultures; which justifies the lower weight that they had in comparison with the three role schemas mentioned earlier.
The weighted mean of participants' responses to each item is given a descriptive interpretation by creating an interval measurement that corresponds to each interpretation as shown in Table (B) below.It is found that the general attitude concerning the three role schemas (leader, decision maker, and authoritarian) regards them as being frequently available in occupants of the relevant positions.While other role schemas like (representative, coordinator, and supervisor) are mainly viewed as being sometimes present.It seems that the participants' evaluation is influenced by their collective cultural belief of inequality and ranking between individuals.

Conceptual Analysis and Discussion of the Results
The participants seem to assign a leadership role to the ' president of department: ‫قسم‬ ‫;'رئيس‬ a person whose position is at the top of the hierarchy of staff of a department .Though a leader role schema is not absent in the English equivalent 'i.e .head of department', the wording of this title differs due to the English cultural analytic cognition which views the head of a department The leader role retreated to a third rank on the scale with the chancellor 'president of university' as the role of decision maker ranked at the top among all other proposed roles with a mean value of (4,818) and a percentage of (80,3%.),authoritarian came next with (4.621, and 77.02%) for the mean and percentage.In Iraqi universities, the chancellor "president of university" has highlevel access to executive powers in university.As such, the authoritarian role is ascribed to him by learners.However, an English chancellor's authority is delegated to him by the university official board, and he acts within a democratic rather than autocratic setting (his decisions are subject to discussion or objection by the university council).The self-schema and person schema in English society admit an individual as an independent entity in any discourse and deny any discrimination between individuals.By contrast, these two schemas in Iraqi culture accept individuals as dependent entities and followers to those at the top of the staff hierarchy.This causes a difference in the role schemas related to the same official position in the two cultures and, consequently, their linguistic externalizations.
As for the head/ chair of a committee, 'president of a committee', the statistics showed that the participants evaluated him as a representative of the group.This can be inferred from the greatest value of the mean (4.197) and the greatest weight (70%) calculated for this role option.A leader and a decision maker were the second and the third ranks in the role hierarchy determined by the participants' opinions with values of (4.182) and (3.924) and (69.7% and 65.4% )for the mean and percentage, respectively.
In Iraqi collective culture, the 'chair/head of a committee: ‫لجن‬ ‫رئيس‬ ‫ة‬ ' is perceived as the typical of a group.That person who occupies the foremost position in his group is valued as a first rank existent, while other members of the committee are seen as the second rank existents who are dependent individuals in comparison to their representative.This perception is analogically reflected in the participants' formation of the "president of a committee" collocation.However, British cognition uncovers its analytic nature by directing its attention to the function of an individual in a committee rather than weighing his position in comparison to that of his group members.The English analytic thinkers seem to attend to an individual who is in charge of a meeting rather than the one who is in charge of other committee members.For them, chairing a committee is perceived as a kind of service done by the occupant of this position rather than an advantage that discriminates him.English expressions like 'chairman' or 'head of a committee' may symbolize the power delegated to the individual in such a position to represent the whole committee in running the meeting event.
A leader, an authoritarian, and a decision maker were the most prominent ascribed roles to the president ( ‫الدولة‬ ‫رئيس‬ ) according to the participants' responses with the mean values of (4.909,4.894,and 4.879) and weights of (81.8 %, 81.6, and % 81.3%).The president in Iraqi culture is related to the highest legislative authority in the country; a position that affects all of society.This widedomain influence foregrounds the leader's role in the cognition of Iraqi people who, as collective thinkers, do not detach this person from the context of the long list of powers he has.Although the wide-power privilege is available to the English president, his authority and decisions are still under the control of the democratic political culture, which allows the public to reject and deny the president's actions and decisions.It is expected that while patterning the English title 'president', the English natives attend to the wide-range of responsibilities of the president ,rather than his authoritarian power, through which he is symbolized as the chief leader of the country rather than the absolute leader.
According to the responses, the 'prime minister' ( ‫رئيس‬ ‫وزراء‬ : President of ministers) was mainly a decision maker, and his being authoritarian came in the second rank while the leader role moved back to the third position.The means values and percentages for these roles were (4.924, 4.848, and 4.788), and (82.1%, 80.8 %, and 79.8%); respectively.The privilege of being the source of deciding and assigning other ministers' positions seems to be the focus of the Iraqi natives who externalized this concept linguistically by 'president'.There is an implied analogy that just as the head ‫)الراس'(‬ assigns the duties to other parts of the body, so does the 'president of ministers'.Authority-dependency relation between the 'president of ministers' and other ministers can be the cultural base on which this title is patterned.Although the English 'prime minister' has the same role of naming other ministers in the government, cultural filtering has its word in the linguistic formation of the decision-maker concept in a way different from its Arabic counterpart.The English cultural cognition focuses on the procedure schema, which sees the prime minister as the first minister among all other ministers appointed by the ruler; a concept that is externalized linguistically by the word 'prime" in the English title 'prime minister'.

Conclusion
This study showed that although the Iraqi EFL learners have various attitudes concerning the roles ascribed to occupants of some official positions, there is a central attitude adopted by the majority of them concerning one particular role option; an outcome that enhances the propositions of earlier theories that cultural cognition is collective and distributed in nature.It is this cognition that limits the learners' ability to produce a native-like speech where words and their meanings are appropriate to the intended conceptual message in accordance with the cultural mentality of the natives of the target language.
The Iraqi EFL learners' poor performance in conversation courses can be attributed to the application of collective thinking procedures to entities whose underlying concepts are patterned and encoded due to the analytic thinking mechanisms of the English society and culture.As people assume shared knowledge when they communicate with each other, deviation from that knowledge due to different thinking styles and, consequently, different encoding and decoding processes can lead to miscommunication or even block communication altogether.This explains why some Iraqi EFL learners' production of English official titles during their conversation course look odd and inaccurate.
It appears that different role schemas underlie the Arabic lexical item ‫'رئيس'‬ (literal translation: president).However, all these schemas shared one particular feature represented by a priority of some kind: a priority in leading a group, representing a group, making a decision, etc. Accordingly, Arabic cultural cognition decided that one linguistic instantiation ‫)رئيس.‪(i.e‬‬can express each of these various role schemas as they are all instances of the seniority concept whose central content component is fully encoded in the Arabic lexical item ' ‫رئيس‬ '.Consequently, the Iraqi EFL learners' overuse of 'president' in English official titles is a sort of a schema -stimulated behavior. The privilege of being first in comparison to others can be enough for a person to preside over other group members who are viewed as a second rank (i.e., dependents) according to Iraqi natives; an attitude of collective thinkers who valued an entity of any kind (whether a human being, a property, a behavior, or any other spiritual or physical existent) in relation to the whole of its relevant context.Adhering to this notion of priority as a distinct privilege and trying to project it on a conceptual content of a target language resulted in the encoding-decoding gap where all or perhaps the majority of the intended messages will be lost or incorrectly communicated.In the case of official titles, for example, using a title that does not fit the collective cultural stance of the natives by employing a vocabulary that can be valued as giving greater or lesser weight to the occupants of the official positions can result in serious problems due to misinterpretation of the utterer's messages and the relevant potential negative communicative consequences.
Another source of producing non-nativelike language by the Iraqi EFL learners can belong to their wrong assumption that similarity between some aspects of role schemas across two cultures is enough to establish a one-to-one correspondence between the relevant linguistic instantiation in one language and its equivalent instantiation in the target language.A salient, though not the only example, is the case of the English 'prime minister' and its Arabic counterpart ‫وزراء'‬ ‫'رئيس‬ (literal translation: president of ministers).The occupants of this position have the same prominent role of assigning other ministers but this role is valued differently by the English and the Arabic cultural cognitions.The priority of being named for this position among all other ministers in the government is regarded (from the English point of view) as the first step of government formation.However, Arabs view this priority as a distinctive first rank property granted for the Arabic minister in such a position.Consequently, the prime minister does not have the same cultural image as the president of ministers ( ‫رئيس‬ ‫وزراء‬ ) in spite of their similar duties.Unawareness of this notion led the learners to adopt inaccurate title collocations while communicating in English.
Finally, the role schema can be regarded as the most prominent schema that causes the participants' poor performance in terms of official titles, yet it is not the only one.Actually, all kinds of schemas mentioned by Nishida (1999) interacted to formulate the role schema underlying these titles.However, it can be said that self-schema and person schema were the salient ones as the natives of a language value a person as being equal or higher than them in light of their evaluation of themselves and of that person, and they ascribed him some particular role accordingly.The participants' attitudes also did no detach from the context schema where they assumed that the word 'president' best fits a person at the top of the hierarchy of staff / or a work team.In addition, the whole process of the learners' scanning of their own cultural schemas to communicate something in the target language was a sort of a problem-solving strategy.The interdependency of schemas was also noticed in that even when the procedure schema (or any other schema) showed some level of similarity across the cultures of the two languages, differences between other types of schemas had their impact on the corresponding linguistic instantiations.Accordingly, teaching language within the cultural framework of its speakers can be the best strategy that enables the learners of dealing with the dynamic interrelation between schemas and selecting the relevant linguistic expressions accurately.
first step of investigation started with the investigator's observation of the frequent production of inaccurate official English titles by the Iraqi EFL learners while they were speaking about different topics during the conversation course in their academic study.Out of the long list of inaccurate cultural equivalents included in the learners' responses, the investigator selected the following five administrative titles: Head of Department ‫قسم(‬ ‫,رئيس‬ literal translation: President of Department), Chancellor ( ‫رئيس‬ ‫:جامعة‬ literal translation: President of University), chair of a committee/ Head of a committee ( ‫لجن‬ ‫رئيس‬ ‫ة‬ literal translation: President of a Committee), the President ( ‫رئيس‬ ‫ال‬ ‫دولة‬ : literal translation: the President of Republic), and Prime Minister ( ‫رئيس‬ ‫وزراء‬

Table ( A
): Statistics of Participants' Responses of that department, just like the head is a part of the body.The mean value for this role was (4.788), and the percentage was (79,8); which is the highest weight among all other responses for this item.Decision maker and authoritarian came as the second and third assigned roles with mean values and percentages of (4.606, 4.424) and (76.8 %, 73.7%) respectively.The mean values for each role in this item fall within the interval (4.336-5.169);which implies that each role is regarded as being frequently played by the occupant of this official position; with the leader role schema having the highest value among all other assigned roles for the' president of department'.