EFL STUDENTS’ USES OF UM AS FILLERS IN SPEAKING

This research was carried out to investigate the EFL students’ uses of um as fillers in speaking. The objective of the research is to find out the occurrences of um used by EFL students in speaking. A total of ten students speaking in English based on different utterances but in the same topic were collected and analyzed, they are the students of the eighth grade at MTs Nurul Iman Telaga Jernih, Secanggang. By using Clark and Tree’s (2002) framework on the use of um, the study shows that the filled pause of um played different roles based on the speaker’s thoughts on feelings of uncertainty. Descriptive qualitative method was used in this research. The instrument of the research was oral test. The occurrences of um made by the students were 35 occurrences. The occurrences found were at the boundary (front), after the first word (middle) and later (in the last sentence). It means all the occurrences of um as fillers were found in this research.