A Study Of Process-Genre Approach To Teching Hedges

Hedges, which belong to fuzzy language, are often employed as a way to realize tentativeness and mitigation. Particularly in academic writing, hedges are used to reveal the writer’s attitudes on the propositions and to leave room for negotiation between writers and audiences. In some circumstances, researchers need to state their views cautiously for the sake of catering to the academic community’s expectations and to win acceptance and support for their claims. Particularly, one of the approaches to arrive at this purpose is through the use of hedges. Nevertheless, many researches indicate that compared with English native speakers, Chinese EFL learners exhibit a lack of ability to hedge in terms of total number and types of hedges in academic writing.Hence, this research aims at examining Chinese non-English postgraduate students’ performance on employing hedges in English abstract writing. Moreover, it is devoted to probing into the application of process-genre approach in hedging instruction. This pedagogical exploration is expected to improve Chinese non-English postgraduates’ awareness and abilities in using hedges in academic writing. Two self-compiled corpora are set up in this project. The research subjects are120non-English postgraduates in BUPT. They are required to hand in an English abstract before and after the training based on process-genre approach respectively. The overall frequency and distributions of hedges used in the two corpora are manually marked out to evaluate the extent to which these subjects have progressed in the appropriate use of hedges.The research results show that:1) Before die training, these subjects employ less hedges in terms of total number and types, compared with English native speakers.2) After the training, they have made progress in the application of some subtypes of hedges. More diversified and larger number of hedges is employed by these subjects. Consequently, the PG approach is effective to raise these subjects’awareness and abilities in using hedges. It is expected that this research could cast implications on hedging instruction and the English abstract wilting instruction for non-English postgraduates.