Hedging In Academic Abstracts By ENL And Chinese EFL Writers: A Contrastive Perspective

As English has increasingly become the established lingua franca of scientific communication, the ability to write effectively in English is a prerequisite for full participation in international research communities and of professional success. As an important part of research articles (RAs), abstracts are now drawing more and more attention of study in linguistics. They constitute the gateway that leads readers to take up an article, journals to select contributions, or organizers of conferences to accept or reject papers.Despite the widely held belief that scientific writing is purely impersonal and objective, effective academic writing actually depends on interactive elements. One of the most significant elements is hedging. Hedging enables writers to express a perspective on their statements, to present unproven claims with caution and to enter into a dialogue with their audiences. However, hedging has been neglected or associated with poor style for a long time. As for non-native speakers of English, the using of hedges proves to be a more difficult task in academic writing.Adopting a quantitative approach, this paper compares the hedging uses in abstracts in two self-complied corpora, namely, ENL corpus and Chinese EFL corpus. Results show that hedges used in the Chinese EFL corpus are much fewer than those in the ENL corpus in terms of both number and variety. The reasons may be diverse. The most possible and important reasons that the paper explores are L1 transfer, cultural factor and insufficient knowledge of EAP (English for Academic Writing) convention. The paper provides some significant suggestions and implications concerning EAP teaching and writing, hoping to enhance Chinese EFL writers' awareness of hedging and improve their proficiency in EAP writing.