Hedging in academic writing: The case of Iranian EFL journals

This study sought to specify whether English articles appearing in Iranian scholarly journals include intensifiers and to determine the frequency of informal hedges vs. formal ones. To this end, 50 articles randomly selected from five different Iranian scholarly EFL journals were analyzed in terms of a taxonomy of different types of hedges and intensifiers. Frequency counts were made in the light of a taxonomy of hedges and overstatements developed by the current researcher. The taxonomy was prepared on the basis of Hinkelʹs (2004 & 2005) outline. The results indicated that contrary to expectations, hedging devices had been used much more frequently than intensifiers in the papers analyzed; a comparison of formal and informal hedged words also indicated that formal hedges are used more frequently than informal ones. The findings have implications for academic writing in EFL contexts.