Page 328 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

314 CHAPTER 12
The uses of hedges are highly conventionalized in academic writ- ing and practically requisite in expressions of personal positions or points of view.
Based on his corpus analysis of published academic prose, Hyland (1998) confirmed that "hedges were by far the most frequent features of writer perspective" (p. 106) and stated that, in academic writing, this find- ing reflects the critical importance of distinguishing fact from opinion and rhetorical persuasion.
However, in composition textbooks and writing guides for basic writ- ers, hedges, often called limiting modifiers (Hacker, 1994; Lunsford & Connors, 1997), are not discussed in detail. Despite the prevalence and importance of hedges in written academic prose, textbooks for teaching ESL and EAP writing rarely focus on hedges of any kind with the excep- tion of modal verbs (Hyland, 1998). One notable exception is the workof
Jordan (1997), whopointed out that hedging in academicwritinginbusi- ness, economics, medical sciences is not just desirable, but requisite. He emphasized that hedging is a "vitally important" (p. 241) skill in L2 aca- demicwritingand suggestedvariousteachingtechniquesforgivingstu- dents practice in the uses of hedges. Similarly, other researchers have noted that L2 learners need to gain an understanding of how hedging the extent of one's claims and certainty reflects the politeness of the aca- demic genre because NNSwriters need to correctly interpret the polite- nessstrategiesemployedbyotherwritersaswellasproduce appropriate text and language (Channell, 1994).
However, several studies have found that L2 academic text frequently contains overstatements, exaggerations, and forceful persuasion (Hinkel, 1997b, 2002a). In general terms, although there may be a variety of rea- sons for the impressions of overstatement and inflation projected in NNS texts, one important consideration may have to do with the fact that rhe- torical uncertainty and the employment of hedges is valued greatly in the Anglo-American, but not necessarily in other, rhetorical traditions (Oliver, 1972; Sa'adeddin, 1989). Furthermore, research has shown that NNS writ- ers have a restricted lexical repertoire that often leads to a shortage of hedging devices employed in L2 written text (Hinkel, 2003a; Hyland, 2002a). Therefore, focused instruction in appropriate uses of varied hedg-
ing is urgently needed.
The discussion of various types of hedging devices presented in this
chapter is organized to begin with the lexically and syntactically simple de- vices and proceed to those of greater complexity. (For additional informa- tion about the hedging properties of conditional, concessive, and time [when] clauses, see chap. 10; the passive voice as hedging, see chap. 7; and indefinite pronouns as hedges, chap. 6.)
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