What EFL Learners Say in Managing Their Speech During Academic Presentations

摘要

Capturing the EFL students in managing their speaking phenomenon led the study to focus on scrutinizing the categories of fillers, as well as identifying the functions of each filler used in an academic presentation. This case study was conducted at one of educational universities in EFL settings with 81 English education students involved as participants. The data were collected through observation, the data were utterances produced, particularly fillers. The data were then analyzed inductively, particularly by using the framework of Chapeton Castro (2009) for the filler analysis. This resulted, first, three categories of filler -simple words, phrases, and clauses- with 27 different examples. There were 15 simple-word filler (ehm, and, oke, so, like, eh, yes/ya, no, because, but, now, then, actually, right? and understand?), 5 phrase fillers (and then, oh ya, yes heem, so that, and of course), and 7 clause fillers (I think, can you get it?, do you understand?, I mean, you got it?, get it?, and you understand?). Second, 11 functions of fillers were found covering: opening frame marker, closing frame marker, turn takers/turn givers, turn keepers, topic switchers, information indicators, repair markers, agreement marker, disagreement marker, response/reaction markers, and checking understanding markers.