2024 IJRSE – Volume 13 Issue 1
Available Online: 10 May 2024
Author/s:
Kyei, Emmanuel*
Akenten Appiah-Menka University of Skills Training and Entrepreneurial Development, Mampong Campus, Ghana (ekyei@aamusted.edu.gh)
Afreh, Esther Serwaah
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana
Kwarteng, Thomas Oduro
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana
Abstract:
Hedging devices abound in academic writing. Few studies, however, have examined how hedges have evolved in academic writing in an ESL context over time. Among the existing studies, contradictory findings exist. The present study was motivated by the contradictory findings and used a corpus of 28762 words culled from postgraduate theses written by L2 Civil Engineering students between 1980 and 2023 to examine the diachronic development of hedges. We used Hyland’s (1998, 2018) taxonomy of hedging devices to analyze the selected corpus. AntConc 4.2.4 Concordance software was used for the analysis of the data. To establish statistical significance, a log-likelihood test was also performed. The analysis revealed that over the past 43 years, the use of hedges has increased significantly (65.10%). Hedging modals were the most commonly used hedging type, whereas hedging nouns were the least frequently utilised. The study also discovered increases in the use of hedging verbs (63.10%), hedging adjectives (1.72%), hedging modals (66.67%), and hedging nouns (97.06%), but decreases in the use of hedging adverbs (-1.86%) and hedging quantifiers/determiners (21.89%). “See” and “show” were the most common lexical verbs, while “possible” and “potential” were the most common hedging adjectives. “Can” was the most often-used hedging modal, “probability” for hedging nouns and “usually” for hedging adverbs. The study concludes that theses in Civil Engineering are becoming more reader-oriented, and that writers’ use of hedges contribute to an increase in persuasiveness in academic texts. The findings of this study have implications for teaching academic writing.
Keywords: academic writing, hedging devices, postgraduate thesis, L2 speakers of English
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5861/ijrse.2024.24022
Cite this article:
Kyei, E., Afreh, E. S., & Kwarteng, T. O. (2024). A diachronic corpus-based study of hedging in L2 postgraduate theses in civil engineering. International Journal of Research Studies in Education, 13(1), 123-135. https://doi.org/10.5861/ijrse.2024.24022
* Corresponding Author