Paper 013: Exploring the Use of Hedges in Academic Writing: A Corpus-Based Analysis Between Chinese TESOL Students and Expert Writers
Chen, Yagang (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
Keywords: hedges, academic writing, Chinese TESOL postgraduates, published research articles
Abstract
The ability to write academic papers in English has been acknowledged as an important criteria to evaluate academic profession around the world (Tang, 2012). In academic writing, appropriate use of hedges is critical. However, the ability to express doubt and certainty appropriately in English is generally acknowledged as a difficult task for language learners. The present study investigates how Chinese TESOL postgraduates employ lexical hedges in their academic writing in comparison to professional writers, attempting to help improve their writing skills. Using Hyland (1998a)’s taxonomy, a quantitative corpus-based study was conducted to examine hedges based on grammatical class and function. The findings demonstrate that： 1） Chinese TESOL postgraduates use hedges extensively in their academic writing. 2）Chinese TESOL students display similarities in overall frequency of hedges and choice of some hedge items. 3）Both groups rely on content-oriented hedges more than reader-oriented hedges. Differences are also detected. Chinese TESOL students employ significantly more hedges than expert writers, particularly with modal verbs and adverbial hedges. Different preferences of individual hedge items by the two groups are also presented. Pedagogical implications generated from the main findings are concerned with material design and teaching instructions for EAP and academic writing courses at tertiary level.
Presentation video
Supplementary Information
None
Q&A live (Zoom) session
| Link: | |
| Notes: |
This looks to be a very interesting paper. I hope you enjoy the conference! – Organizing committee
Very interesting paper, thank you! What recommendations do you have for teaching these hedging techniques to tertiary students in academic writing courses?
Please refer to the extract from my thesis below. Hope this can be useful.
“Hyland (1996a) recommends teachers to guide students to use concordance software to identify hedges in academic writing or in their particular disciplines and advises teachers to develop students’ sense of audience and focus on high frequency items. However, this may not be possible and practical for students with no background knowledge of corpus linguistics. The present study compiled a list of hedges (see Appendix B) for data analysis. Hedges on this list are also hedges with high occurrence and can be used by pre-sessional and EAP course instructors to facilitate student writers to find the appropriate hedge in academic writing. Students can be asked to discuss the effects of adding or removing hedge items for a text or replacing certain hedges with other similar expressions. Tasks should also be designed to help learners develop hedge awareness. For instance, teachers can prepare lists of sentences including observed facts, interpretations and opinions, and guide students to distinguish and categorize the sentences. Previous research has shown the over-reliance on modal verbs in expressing hedging in textbooks, which results in the dominant role and even overuse of modals as hedging. Thus, more updated textbooks that explain hedge functions in detail and employ hedges in a balanced and authentic way are needed.”
“Hyland (1996a) recommends teachers to focus on high frequency hedges. Results in the study contain the most frequent hedges in different subcategories. Teachers can refer to this data when choosing hedge items to teach. Besides, when teaching students in the same field, teachers can replicate the study on their students and compare the results with this study. Differences would indicate overuse or underuse of certain hedges. A teacher may find that a hedge item rarely occurs in the academic writing of his/her students, but appears to be a frequent hedge in the field. It can be that these students do not know the meaning and functions of the hedge. Teachers should make efforts to introduce more hedges like this that are important in the area but ignored by students.”
As for hedge lists, you may find the appendixes of the following papers/books useful.
Hyland, K. (2005). Metadiscourse: Exploring interaction in writing. London: Continuum.
Hyland, K. (1998). Boosting, hedging, and the negotiation of academic knowledge. Text, 18 (3), pp. 349-382.
Thanks! That’s very helpful.