Pauses have an impact on how well listeners comprehend and focus on the meaning of discourse (Bae, 2015). This study was aimed at investigating what types of pauses undergraduate students made during speaking and why undergraduate students made pauses during their English speaking. The types of pauses focused on in this study were silent pauses, lexicalized filled pauses, and unlexicalized filled pauses. The participants of this study were 40 Thai undergraduate university students studying for a bachelor’s degree at a university in Bangkok, Thailand. This study was conducted using a mixed-methods approach. Quantitatively, the demographic data of the participants was collected. Moreover, the participants were tested on their ability to produce a 2-minute English speech based on the prompt provided to investigate their pausing. There were four speaking prompts based on the topics and content they had previously studied. Then, the frequency of pausing during their speech production was collected. Qualitatively, a retrospective verbal protocol method was conducted on the same day of data collection to explore factors affecting the participants’ pauses during speaking. The results showed that both male and female students employed silent pauses the most among the three types of focus, and the percentage of silent pauses made by the two groups of students was quite identical. Furthermore, the results obtained from the retrospective verbal protocol reflected that the reasons behind the students’ pausing were thinking of the content, hesitating to produce some grammatical structures, and thinking of vocabulary and word uses, respectively.

Authors:
Sawaros Jaiprasong, Thammasat University, Thailand

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Posted by Clive Staples Lewis

Last updated: 2023-02-23 23:45:00

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