Tips that Will Help Remove Fillers While Speaking

In the IELTS speaking test, it is extremely essential to speak fluently without hesitation. If you cannot find a suitable word and hesitate, it gives a negative impression of your speaking skills and you will lose marks. Hesitation distracts the listener and they thus have difficulty following what you are saying. Often when people are speaking and they are unable to find a word to express their thoughts and ideas they use "fillers" like: "ah, um, er, uh". These do not add any value to your speaking. You should try to minimize filler words as much as possible.

Types of Speech Fillers: Filler words are words that are used by people to bridge the gap in speaking. There are three types of speech fillers:

● Filler sounds: ah, um, uh, er, mm

● Filler words: So, but, and, like, actually, basically, literally

● Filler phrases: You know, I mean, What I am trying to say is.

How to Remove Speech Fillers: Pause & Think

Instead of hesitating, pause, take a breath of air and give yourself a quick moment to think. Often good speakers will briefly pause before saying something important. Use this to your advantage, you too can pause and voice your thoughts in a well-structured manner. This way you will come off as confident and sure of yourself.

Use transitional words Rather than saying “um” or “ah”, you can instead say “another point I would like to say is that”, “moreover, I think that”, “another thing I want to mention is”, “I would like to add”, “in other words, we can say that”, etc. These transitional words help you to "go with the flow" making you sound natural and sure of yourself. A note of caution: do not overuse transitional words too much or they might have a negative impact, you must also use them in the appropriate context. If you are unsure of using a transitional

phrase you will be better off taking a brief pause.

Strategy- It's always good to go into an exam with a strategy. Having a strategy helps with boosting your confidence, keeping you on track. A simple strategy is to think before you speak, when you are given your speaking prompt, do not begin speaking at once, briefly pause, think about what you want to say and how you want to say it. And while speaking be sure of yourself, do not doubt yourself.

Speak slowly, not rapidly- Do not rush through what you have to say, speak at a comfortable pace. Pause when you have to do not rush through, just as while you write you use full stops and commas, when you speak you treat your pauses as punctuation.

Record your voice - A very good strategy that works effectively in speaking is to record voice. You may record your voice on the phone or use an online tool for the same. Just take a cue card and keep on speaking on that topic for 2-3 minutes. If you use filler words

excessively, you may like to do an exercise of counting fillers. When you listen to your recorded voice, count the number of fillers. This will give you an idea how far you need to work on avoiding fillers. When recorded your voice, then play it to analyze how many times you have been using fillers, hesitation while speaking, how it has affected your overall flow of speaking, and whether it was necessary to use fillers, etc.