The Speech Problem: Meet your pet fillers




Target: This lesson aims to give students the awareness of using fillers.

Fillers can be very useful, especially that sometimes they make us feel relaxed when we speak and give us time to think of what we would like to say next. And with some people, that number can be amazingly high. Some people tack fillers onto the end of every sentence, and sandwich them between every phrase. It becomes, you know, really difficult for them to say anything without adding these empty additional phrases, you know?

The aim of this session is not to totally eliminate the usage of fillers, but to give the students some ideas of when and how to use them. Speech Lesson:

Your first task is simple: use the Tell-Me Game to identify your favorite filler words and phrases.

You will need TO FEEL COMFORTABLE for this exercise. As the listeners, other students' role is to listen for the particular speech problem being worked on and record all instances of the speech problem. As the speaker, your role is to speak impromptu on one of the following speech topics for two minutes.

Do NOT spend time thinking about the topic before you speak. Please, do not prepare your speech by writing it down on a paper because the teacher will pick a topic for you.

1. Your favourite hobby and why it’s your favourite.
2. What you would do if you won five million dollars on the lottery?
3. Which of the five senses is most important? Why?
4. What skill or talent would you most like to have? Why?
5. What are the best things to do to relax? Why?
6. Who do you most admire? Why?
7. If you could visit any place in the world, where would you go? Why?