Fluencemes in EFL Learners’ On-screen Communication

Abstract

Nowadays, on-screen communication is more popular than face-to-face communication. Since people have an ad-
vanced communication facility, communication is unlimited, and people-to-people connections are made from home with computers and telephones. Through on-screen communication, people are more accessible to express themselves. Nevertheless, hesitation is always present. Fluency-enhancing strategies are present to lessen hesitations through fluencemes. Fluenceme is the disfluency in the flow of conversation. However, fluencemes are not always hesitant. Indeed, they act as strategies. This qualitative study identified the types of fluenceme while ELF learners were making on-screen communication and the functions of fluenceme in enhancing the strategy of fluency. Ten pairs of EFL fifth-semester students were taken by adapting a purposive sampling approach. The observational method was applied for data collection by watching and listening to video recordings and noting the dialogues. By applying the identity method, the utterances which show fluenceme issues were analysed by identifying and revealing them to classify their types. The finding was described descriptively. The investigation uncovered that the participants naturally presented filled pauses, discourse markers, explicit editing terms, false starts, identical repetition, modified repetition, and morphological substitution. They had relaxed conversations because there was speaker-and-hearer-only on screen. Thus, the disfluency was not a hesitancy but a strategy to cover disfluency. Hoping that future researchers may explore a wide variety of fluencemes and develop a solution to avoid the excessive fluencemes use in communication. Finally, this study may become an incentive for further research to describe profound insight of fluenceme as a wealth of linguistic knowledge.