Distribution of Hesitation Discourse Markers Used by Iranian EFL Learners during an Oral L2 Test

Abstract

Previous studies on hesitation strategies used by beginner or advanced L2 learners revealed that beginners mostly leave their hesitation pauses unfilled which causes their speech to sound disfluent, and advanced learners tend to use various fillers in order to sound like native speakers. The present paper reports on a study which investigated the distribution of hesitation discourse markers including silent pauses, silent pauses and fillers, fillers, and non-lexical words used by Iranian university students in an oral (L2) test. The study examines the location of the discourse markers of hesitation across utterances produced by the participants. The respondents were a group of students registered in the Tertiary English Language Program at a university in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The aim was to identify the frequency of all hesitation strategies used in four locations of Initial, Middle, and Final position of the utterances to find out the most frequent location of hesitation during an oral (L2) test.