THE USE OF HEDGING IN ACADEMIC WRITING BY ESL UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN NAWABSHAH

Abstract

Hedging is a vital rhetorical device in academic writing which can be used to convey caution, uncertainty, and limited support of claims. The present study aimed at exploring the role of hedging devices in academic writing of the ESL undergraduate students of a public sector university in Nawabshah, Sindh, Pakistan. The purpose of this study was to investigate the kind, frequency and patterns of hedging used by students and the related problems. The qualitative document analysis design was used. The data comprised of 35 authentic student writing samples from the undergraduate final year students of English department at public sector university in Nawabshah . An analysis was made using the hedging taxonomy developed by Hyland (1998). The results showed that the students employed a few hedges per 1,000 words, which is an average of 13-15. Modal verbs (may, might, can, could) were the most salient of the category, while more advanced epistemic lexical verbs, adverbs and phrases were seldom used. Many claims were written as statements and this meant that there was only a narrow range and there was not much variation in the use of hedges. The study shows that the context of the ESL classroom poses challenges for ESL learners in regards to the use of hedging, a result mainly of L1 rhetorical transfer and insufficient explicit instruction. The results of these findings indicate that there is a need to pay more pedagogic attention to metadiscourse features in academic writing courses. The study makes some practical suggestions to incorporate the concept of hedging in public sector universities in Pakistan to enhance the ESL students' writing in a balanced, credible and academically competent manner.