Lost For Words - Fillers
Learn useful words for spoken fluency and speaking examinations.
I'm currently teaching the IELTS course at The London School of English at our Westcroft Square school and I have been talking to my class about how to use fillers. These are spoken words we use to fill the gaps that we leave when we are thinking about what to say. They are helpful for all speaking exams because they help to give you some time to develop your ideas, while keeping the conversation going. They can make you sound fluent and more natural, as well as help you to avoid long pauses when you are speaking.
Have a look at the following text which uses a large number of fillers. Can you reduce the text to it's most basic meaning?
Basically, like, there are lots of times, kind of, in our daily conversations, when we, sort of use, a lot of unnecessary words, if you know what I mean, and, y’know it’s a bit like, what we say has no real meaning, and, um, actually, sometimes, well, it’s like we just need to keep on speaking, while, we’re trying to, kind of, think about, what we want to say, and, in a manner of speaking, how we’re going to say it, if you catch my drift? At the end of the day, the bottom line is, being able to use these unnecessary words, a bit, can, kind of help a bit, with whachamacallit, spoken fluency, which, in some way, can, in fact, improve our speaking, from time to time, and, to be honest, by, sort of, filling the gaps, we would, sort of leave, if we, maybe, didn’t use these words.
I'll post up the reduced text next week. In the meantime,how many of the fillers do you know and use when you are speaking?
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