ASSESSING LEARNING CONTROL OF ENGLISH HEDGES AMONG TERTIARY CANTONESE-SPEAKING EFL STUDENTS
Journal Title: European Journal of Business and Social Sciences - Year 2014, Vol 3, Issue 8
Abstract
This project was designed to try to investigate the difficulties EFL learners would have in learning to use hedging as a rhetorical device in academic writing. The participants were 136 native Cantonese-speaking EFL students who enrolled in the one-year course “English for Academic Purposes†offered by a language centre at a university in Hong Kong. Specifically, this paper aimed: 1) to examine whether there was a significant increase in the number of hedges used in the discussion essays written by students at the beginning of a one-year EAP course (the control group) and at mid-course (the experimental group), and 2) to determine whether, in a specific context, the subjects’ use of hedges was appropriate. The measurements for the first purpose included a ranking of hedges, which was modified from Halliday’s (1994) ranking of modal verbs. The measurements for the second purpose entailed frequency counts of hedging errors.
Authors and Affiliations
SIU, Fiona Kwai Peng| PhD in Applied Linguistics from Macquarie University, The ELC, City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Hong Kong
Keywords
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