As part of the effort to elevate the oral English proficiency of Thai EFL learners, this paper explores university students' target-deviant English use in conversation, which should be systematically tackled in conversation teaching. Data examined included 41 two-three-minute video-recorded role-play dialogues from two English conversation classes. The data was transcribed and analyzed following the Conversation Analysis (CA) framework. The students' conversational English problems were detected in four key areas. First, those involving segmental organization included final-sound omission and incorrect pronunciation of vowel sounds (with the highest frequency); and [l] or [r] deletion in consonant clusters. Second, problems with super-segmental organization contained stress (third-highest frequency), and too many pauses within turn construction units (TCUs). Next, ungrammatical TCUs (second-highest frequency) were found in syntactic organization. Finally, problems with sequence organization included abrupt conversation closing; irrelevant adjacency pairs; topic shifts without signposts; inappropriate expressions to identify oneself on the phone; and inappropriate responses to an announcement of bad news. It is recommended that in conversation class, students be made more aware of correct English pronunciation and provided more opportunities to practice making goal-oriented, casual conversation with explicit feedback regarding natural conversation mechanisms involved in realizing particular interactional goals.

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