Abstract
With the purpose of identifying strategies to be taught in junior high schools, the present study (a) investigates the relations among hesitation phenomena in students' utterances, their linguistic proficiency, and their anxiety over English conversations, and (b) explores students' use of Conversational Strategies. To this end, proficiency tests (consisting of Listening (section) and Structure & Reading (section)), four-point-scale questionnaires for measuring anxiety, and a four-minute interview task were administered to 37 JHS students. The results show that (a) students lacked turn-taking skills, (b) linguistic proficiency had much to do with speech rate, (c) pause length was relevant to students' anxiety, and (d) students rarely used Conversational Strategies like 'Asking for Repetitions', 'Fillers', and 'Paraphrasing'.
