Teaching Fillers and Students’ Filler Usage: A Study Conducted at ESOGU Preparation School

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to emphasize the importance of teaching fillers to students in ESL / EFL classrooms, and investigate whether students use fillers after they have been taught and if so, which fillers they tend to use and why. Although there might be no teaching issue for acquisition of fillers, being spoken discourse markers, the aim was rather increasing the learners’ awareness of fillers when they hesitate in the foreign language, which is actually the very nature of speaking. Two speaking session recordings were conducted with 7 elementary-level preparation class students at Eskisehir Osmangazi University in the autumn semester of 2013/2014 academic year. Fillers were taught in between the sessions, and the filler use of students was investigated before and after teaching. The whole process was conducted in 5 week-time. Through voice recordings and related transcriptions, the results basically revealed that the students used fillers in the second session after they were taught and were provided related activities to practise fillers. Although what fillers they tended to use in the second session speaking and what they would use generally differed at certain points, they generally preferred the fillers uhm / ehm, well and how to say / how can I say.

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