A Comparative Study On The Use Of Hedges In Academic English Writing By Chinese And English Students

With increasing attention attached to academic English writing,numerous scholars have offered their valuable contributions.Some of them discovered that using hedging devices appropriately was a key to producing satisfying academic discourses.As acknowledged by many scholars and theories,to modify one's proposition or statement in academic writing can help to construct a responsible identity of the writer and also create a harmonious reader-writer relation,which can contribute to reader's acceptance and appreciation of both the article and the writer.Important as it may be,studies found that non-native speakers tended to underuse or misuse hedges in academic English writing.In order to testify whether Chinese learners can use hedges in a native-like manner,this study researched on hedges in academic English writing produced by non-native speakers in Capital University of Economics and Business.Centered on this issue,the present study adopts Hallidayan functional grammar as the theoretical basis to elaborate the importance of reader-writer rapport.This study also applies Aristotle's rhetoric theory,Bakhtin's theory of heteroglossia and Habermas' theory of communicative action as theoretical perspectives to offer different voices from other fields.The present study aims to answer the following two research questions:(1)Are there any differences in terms of quantity in the use of hedges betweenNNSs and NSs in academic English writing? If yes,in what way?(2)Are there any differences in terms of value level in their use of hedges? If yes,in what way?To answer these research questions,this study employs a corpus-based method.First,67 pieces of academic English writings were collected from University of Economics and Business to compile CUEB Corpus.Then,53 pieces were selected from British Academic Written English corpus(BAWE Corpus)and used to conduct the contrastive study.In data analysis,WordSmith and SPSS are employed to concord and to provide statistic evidence to prove whether there are significant differences between the results of the two corpora.The results indicates that NNSs tended to underuse hedges in academic English writing,including using fewer hedges in general and inclining to use modal verbs intensively.Furthermore,they also overused high-value hedges.These are considered to be less polite and not acceptable according to English norms.Based on the findings and discussions,pedagogical implications are drawn towards the end of this dissertation.