Teaching the socio-cultural norms of spoken communication to second language learners, especially refugees and migrants, is important (Yates, 2008). However there is little research into the effectiveness of classroom strategies used to teach them (Kasper & Roever, 2004), particularly to lower-level learners. In this presentation we will describe an action research project which evaluates the use of semi-authentic recorded samples to teach socio-cultural norms to low-level EAL refugee learners. Preliminary results show that strategies effective with higher-level learners (Denny, 2008) are not necessarily those resonating with lower-level learners. Implications for the teaching of socio-cultural norms at lower levels are explored.