HESITATION STRATEGY: FILLERS

As spoken discourse is spontaneous and unplanned, speakers sometimes need extra time to think what they are going to say, so they buy extra seconds using fillers, which are noises like ... er..., ...erm..., ..uh/a/.....,...ah......, ... mm/m/..., ...um/am/...., to show that they are thinking and looking for the appropriate words. (/a/, -> pronunciation)


Fillers can be used severel times in the same sentence but do not overuse them.

Example:
"Well, I'm living in this, er, attic at the moment, it's large, old Victoria house. It's, it's very nice actually, it's self-contained, you go up this staircase right to the top and it's got, er, a sloping roof [...]"
(From At the Chalkface: Practical Techniques in Language Teaching. (1985) ed. Alan Matthews, Mary Spratt y Les Dangerfield).


Note: I'll send you the recording of the example by e-mail.