Teaching English Filler Words and Students’ Usage of them: A Study Conducted at Osmangazi University Preparation School

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 Eski