Hedging in English Research Articles of Thai Academic Writers
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Abstract
Hedging is an important convention in academic writing in which non-native English writers should be concerned. It is used to express the writer’s attitudes or ideas in a tentative way to soften the writer’s claims by proposing uncertainty, possibility or doubt. This paper attempts to analyze the hedging markers used by Thai academic novice writers and Thai academic professionals in terms of types and frequency in research articles written in English. The data were taken from twenty research articles published in national and international journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences field. The results showed that both Thai academic novice writers and professionals used a variety of types, namely: Shields, Approximators, and Combined-hedging markers in their academic writing. However, Thai academic professionals appeared to employ these hedging markers more frequently than Thai academic novice writers, especially the combined-hedging, where they combined more than one hedging markers to express their uncertainty and possibility of their propositions.
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References
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