“Filler words” might not be a concept you’re familiar with by name, but they’re definitely something you know about. These are the “ums”, “ahhs”, “you knows”, “likes” and “kind ofs”, to name just a few, that we speakers of English pepper our speech with on a regular basis – whether we mean to or not!
They’re completely natural. For most people they are also largely unconscious and unavoidable. We use them when we are thinking about what to say next, grasping for exactly the right word or just adding a gap to a conversation.
Writing in the Journal of Nonverbal Communication, Nicholas Christenfeld (1995) surveyed a group of students about what they thought of people who used a lot of these filler words. According to his survey, speakers who use too many filler words are “uncomfortable, inarticulate, uninteresting, ill-prepared, nervous, disfluent […] unsophisticated, and lacking confidence”.
Filler words can make people listening assume that a speaker is unprepared or not fully across what they’re talking about. This is even though those listening know that they would probably also be using these filler words were they placed in the same position as the speaker.
Being prepared, at ease and comfortable is one of the best ways to reduce your reliance on filler words. Maintaining a steady pace is one of the best strategies to improving speech. Many people speak quickly when presenting or recording content, and it’s very easy to speak so fast that they outpace their own thoughts.
One way to be better prepared when reading aloud, and to therefore need to use fewer of these filler words, is to use CARS & STARS Online.
CARS & STARS Online is a digital reading comprehension program based on twelve core reading strategies that is designed to turn every student into a comfortable and proficient reader who can approach every type of text with an advanced level of reading comprehension.
A reader who has progressed through CARS & STARS Online won’t just be able to read a text, they’ll be able to determine why they think it was written and what the person who wrote it was trying to get them to think when they read it. What’s more, they’ll be able to do this and many more textual analysis skills as second nature rather than as additional work, because they’ve been made familiar with them across the breadth of the entire program.
CARS & STARS Online aims to take students and make them informed, evaluative interpreters of text. Reading comprehension is a more vital skill than ever, and a student schooled by CARS & STARS Online will be able to perform high-level textual analysis as second nature, on every text – and be confident enough to do so every time.
If you are interested in learning more about the CARS & STARS Online subscriptions and how they can help children to achieve better results, then sign up for a free trial to be an integral part of your child’s reading success.
