Methods, Finding, Discusssion, and Conclusion (Types and Functions of Fillers)

1. What do you think about Petra Square Apartment which is located near our campus? Do you agree with the existence of this apartment or not?

2. As you know this apartment is being done 24 hours a day. This certainly can bring impacts (noise and traffic jam) to the environment. Do you agree with this 24 hour construction work or not?

3. When this apartment is finished, would you rather live in this kind of apartment or in a boarding house?

3.2.3    Data

            The data of this research were fillers in the utterances produced by the first and the seventh semester students of the English Department.

3.2.4    Procedures of Data Collection

Pairing

            In order to get the types and the functions of the fillers produced, I used a role-play in gaining the data from the respondents. First of all, I divided those 40 respondents into 20 pairs consisting of two students from the same semester. So, there will be ten pairs of the first semester students and ten pairs of the seventh semester students. The pair system was used instead of the individual or group system because fillers occur mostly in an interactive or two ways communication. So in my opinion, the individual system had a strong weakness to be deleted from this procedure since it was a one way communication. Similarly, the group system consisting of more than two respondents had a strong weakness not to be used for this research because the more the respondents, the more ineffective the conversation was since if one spoke up, the other would only listen and kept silent. It made me difficult to gain fillers if the respondents mostly kept silent during the role-play. That was why I decided to apply a pair system since the conversation was run in a two-way-communication in an effective way for two respondents only. Besides, by applying this pair system, I could get fillers easier.

            Besides deciding the pair system, I also decided to pair the respondents from the same semester because I assumed that generally the students from the same semester would minimally know each other and were closer to each other, so they were expected to get involved to the conversation comfortably. In contrast, the students from different semesters were thought to get more difficulty when having the conversation because they were strange to each other so it would influence the smoothness of the conversation. That was why I decided to pair the students from the same semester.

 

Preparing the Questions for the Pairs