Hedges In Chinese Non-English-Major College Learners' Spoken English

Hedges, the linguistic devices used to indicate different degrees of less than full commitment to conceptualizations of the universe, have been extensively studied from different perspectives since they were introduced into linguistics. The use of hedges, closely associated with several important pragmatic theories, is viewed as an important component of pragmatic competence. Therefore, the study of hedges used by EFL students provides a proper opportunity to investigate their pragmatic competence. However, little attention has been paid to the use of hedges in the spoken English of Chinese non-English-major college learners ("CCLs"for short), which should be considered as a deficiency in college EFL teaching and learning. This study is undertaken to investigate their use of hedges, aiming to throw some light on the development of their pragmatic competence in using hedges.To achieve the aim of this study, the approach of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis is adopted, involving an interlanguage corpus compiled from COLSEC (College Learners' Spoken English Corpus) and a native English corpus from the spoken part of BNC (British National Corpus). It is hoped that through the comparison we can find out the features and deficiencies in the use of hedges by CCLs, interpret the results, and put forward some suggestions on how to increase the proficiency in using hedges in college EFL teaching and learning.After a detailed analysis, we find both similarities and differences in using hedges between CCLs and NSs (native English speakers). On the one hand, hedging devices are frequently used by both of them, and the most frequent items in most subcategories are similar. On the other hand, hedging devices are overused by CCLs with a rather limited range of items. Some basic items are overused to such a degree that they contribute substantially to the high frequency of some categories of hedges and even the hedges as a whole in the spoken English of CCLs. Thus categories of hedges used by CCLs are not distributed as evenly as those used by NSs. It is shown that CCLs have developed to some degree the awareness of using the important pragmatic strategy to express tentativeness and possibility in communication. However, the level of English proficiency and a lack of systematic instruction of hedges in EFL teaching seem to hinder CCLs from using hedges appropriately.It is suggested that some exercises can be designed to heighten CCLs'awareness of hedging, that various hedging realizations ought to be provided to enrich students'choices to achieve the same purpose, and that L1 transfer should also be taken into consideration in EFL teaching.