Abstract:
Expressing doubt and certainty in academic writings requires a cautious use of hedges and boosters. Despite their importance in academic writing, little is known about how they are used in monolingual and bilingual male and female EFL learners’ academic writings. To shed some lights on the issue, the present study investigated the use of hedges and boosters in research articles written by monolingual and bilingual male and female EFL learners. Based on the collected corpus from twelve academic research articles, the overall rhetorical and categorical distribution of hedges and boosters were identified across four sections of these articles (Abstract, Introduction, Discussion, and Conclusion). The results evinced that the overall distribution of hedges and boosters in research articles written by bilinguals was higher than that of monolinguals. Moreover, there were significant differences between male and female EFL learners in the use of hedges and boosters in their academic research articles. These findings not only paved the way for further studies in the use of hedges and boosters but they also presented some beneficial implications for teaching of academic writing to EFL learners.
Machine summary:
"The Use of Hedges and Boosters in Monolingual and Bilingual EFL Learners’ Academic Writings: The Case of Iranian Male and Female Post-graduate MA Articles Mir Ayyoob Tabatabaei*1, Samad Ramzi2 1, 2Department of Humanities, Payam-e Noor University, Tehran, IRI *Corresponding author: tabatabaee_777@yahoo.
To shed some lights on the issue, the present study investigated the use of hedges and boosters in research articles written by monolingual and bilingual male and female EFL learners.
In order to shed some lights on these issues, the present study aims at investigating the use of hedges and boosters by male and female monolingual and bilingual EFL learners' academic writings.
(3) What are the differences between male and female bilingual EFL learners’ use of hedges and boosters across the rhetorical sections in academic research articles?
Procedure One of the main objectives of this study was to explore the use of hedges and boosters across the four sections of research articles written by monolingual and bilingual EFL learners: Abstract, Introduction, Discussion, and Conclusion.
Another aim was to identify the differences between male and female EFL writers in the use of hedges and boosters across these two language status (monolingual and bilingual) and four rhetorical sections of research articles (Abstract, Introduction, Discussion, and Conclusion sections).
The results of the data analysis revealed some similarities and differences in the overall, rhetorical, and categorical distribution of hedges and boosters between monolingual and bilingual male and female EFL learners’ academic research articles."