A Contrastive Study Of The Usage Of Types And Forms Of Hedges Between Novice And Experienced English Teachers In Senior High School

Hedges are widely used in people' s communication and written language,which is a common phenomenon in communication.Lakoff(1972)defined hedges as words that blur things.He Ziran(1985)divided hedges into variable hedges and moderated hedges.And it is also presented by different forms,such as adjectives and adverbs,word formation affixes,adverbial of manner or degree and some sentence structures(Zadeh,1971).In language teaching,the use of hedges can reduce the arbitrariness of teachers' expression,enhance the accuracy of classroom discourse communication,contribute to the positive interaction between teachers and students,so as to improve the effect of classroom teaching,and promote students' language use and expression ability.Therefore,this study mainly investigates and compares the types and forms of hedges used by novice and experienced teachers in senior high school English classes,as well as the frequency of their use,so as to help senior high school English teachers use hedges more effectively in class and improve the teaching effect.Based on the theories of Krashen' s language input theory and face theory,this study attempts to answer two research questions by using classroom recording and interview:(1)What types and forms of hedges are used by both novice and experienced teachers in English classroom discourse in senior high school? And what is their frequency?(2)What are the similarities and differences between the uses of hedges of high school English novice and experienced teachers? In this study,four English teachers in grade two of X Middle School in Yining City are chosen as the research subjects,among which two are novice teachers and two are experienced teachers.The author recorded two lessons for each teacher,totally eight lessons as the corpus,and then transcribed and classified the collected corpus,analyzed and compared the types and forms of hedges used by novice and experienced teachers.In addition,the author also interviewed these four teachers in order to further prove the results of the data.The conclusions are as follows:(1)As for the types,four types of hedges all used,which are range variable hedges,degree variable hedges,direct moderated hedges and indirect moderated hedges.Among them,the most frequently used hedges are degree variable hedges(36.67%),and the least one is indirect moderated hedges(18.75%).As for the forms,four forms of hedges all used,which are adjectives and adverbs,word formation affixes,manner or degree adverbials and some sentence structures.Among them,adjectives and adverbs are frequently used.(45.80%),and the least form is word formation affixes(7.08%).(2)As for the similarities,both novice teachers and experienced teachers use variable hedges more frequently than moderated hedges,and the form of adjective and adverb is most frequently used by novice and experienced teachers,and the form of word formation affixes is least frequently used.As for the differences,the overall frequency of the four types used by experienced teachers is higher than that of novice teachers,and novice teachers use the form of adjective and adverb more frequently than that of experienced teachers while the frequency of other three forms used by novice teachers is lower than that of experienced teachers.The enlightenment obtained through this study has the following points:(1)In the process of teaching,teachers should pay more attention to the use of hedges to assist classroom teaching,especially novice teachers,who can make up for their less rich teaching experience,improve the ability of using hedges,achieve efficient classroom communication and improve classroom efficiency.(2)When teachers use hedges,they should pay attention to the diversity of their use and make full use of various types and forms of hedges to make the classroom more colorful.(3)When teachers use hedges in the classroom,they should pay attention to using them in the appropriate context;and the number of hedges used in class should be moderate;and teachers should use more hedges that students can easily accept,such as degree variable hedges.