The Use of Hedging Devices in Scientific Research Report Writing: A Corpus-Based Comparative Study of Graduate and Undergraduate Students in Social Sciences at a University in Thailand
Keywords:
Discourse Analysis, English for Academic Purposes Hedging in Academic Writing, English Writing Proficiency LevelsAbstract
Due to the importance of English as an international language in many academic fields, academic writers who aim to publish their work and gain acceptance in the international academic community often try to apply language devices that help them reach the expectations of the discourse community. Among other frequently used devices, academic writers employ hedges to express their claims or arguments in a tentative manner to show their politeness. This paper presents a preliminary study on the use of hedging devices by two groups of students across different academic levels. The two corpora consisted of discussion/conclusion sections of 15 theses written by the graduates and undergraduates in social sciences of a university. With the taxonomy of hedges proposed by Hyland (1998) as the analytical framework, the findings revealed that, regarding the frequencies of overall hedging devices (research question 1), the lower-level writers in this study tended to hedge more frequently. Involving the pattern of hedging categories (research question 2), both groups were similar in terms of the most and the least frequently used hedging categories. However, concerning linguistic expressions of hedging devices (research question 3), the upper-level writers tended to use more various hedging expressions.
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