Hedging In English Academic Writing By Chinese EFL Learners

Nowadays English is the well established Lingua Franca of scientific communication in the present world. Therefore possession of the ability to write effectively in English is a prerequisite for scientific researchers to communicate successfully in their research community. Hedging, as an important strategy in English academic writing, has received more and more attention recently. It can express the writers' attitude towards both claims and readers, leave room for discussion between writers and readers, show the writers' scientific honesty and deference to the research community and make the claims more acceptable. Despite its importance, hedging has been ignored for quite a long time, even mistaken with poor writing style. As a result, many claims made in the academic writing tend to be too assertive and overconfident. This problem is more serious for non-native English learners, who are often advised to avoid hedges and to adopt a detached style in their academic writing.Based on two self-complied academic corpora, the Corpus of Chinese Learners of English (CCLE) and the Corpus of Native Speakers of English (CNSE), this paper made an empirical and descriptive study of the incidences, categories and distribution of hedges by Chinese EFL learner and native English speakers. Results indicate that hedges used in CCLE are fewer than those in CNSE both in number and in category. The underling factors mainly include: (1) the complexity of hedging which posits a great problem for non-native speakers, (2) Chinese EFL learners' lack of the awareness of hedging in academic writing, (3) cultural differences between English and Chinese, (4) poor pragmatic competence, and (5) poor language proficiency.In the conclusion section, some suggestions are provided concerning the pedagogy of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) with the intention to nurture the Chinese EFL learners' awareness of hedging and improve their ability of using hedging devices appropriately in the academic writing.