EL Education Curriculum

This story by the BBC is about the use of filler words such as “like” in a conversation. According to the Pocket Fowler, fillers refer to words such as actually, you know, in fact,really, and I mean, and pause markers such as er and um, that have little or no meaning andare used to help maintain a flow, and sometimes improve sentence balance, in conversational English. “Their routine use is quite legitimate, and everyday discourse would be unnatural without them.”