A Cross-Cultural Study of Hedging Devices in Discussion Section of Applied linguistics Research Articles

The most significant aspect of scientific discourse is to weigh evidence and draw conclusions from data. Academic writers need to present their claims cautiously, accurately and modestly in order to meet the expectations of the corresponding discourse community and to enter a dialogue with their audience. Hedges can serve as the interactive elements which bridge between text information and author s interpretation. The present study examined the impact of language/culture on the use of hedging strategies in academic writing of English and Persian Native Speakers in English applied linguistics research articles. To this end, 108 applied linguistics research articles written by English and Persian Native Speakers were selected on the basis of stratified sampling randomization. The discussion section of experimental and descriptive research articles were compared for the amounts and types of hedges through chi-square analysis. The findings show that there are some significant differences between hedges used by English and Persian native speakers of English applied linguistics articles in the corpus. More specifically, English native speaker writers were found to use a variety of terms to express tentativeness and their degree of commitment towards their findings. The findings have theoretical and pedagogical implications for English for Academic/Specific Purposes.