Hedging and Boosting in the Introduction and Discussion Sections of English Research Articles: A Cross-cultural Study of Papers Written by Native and Non-native Academics

Expressing doubt and certainty is a significant feature of academic writing where the authors have to distinguish opinion from factual information and evaluate the force of their statements in an acceptable and persuasive way. Hedging and boosting markers are two interactional metadiscourse strategies employed for this purpose. The present cross-cultural study aimed therefore at analysing the type and frequency of hedges and boosters in English research articles by native (AngloAmerican) and non-native (Iranian and Burundi) authors in the field of Applied Linguistics. Based on a corpus of thirty research articles and adopting the taxonomies of Hyland (1998a, 2005a) and Hinkel (2005), the overall rhetorical and categorical distribution of hedges and boosters were analysed across two rhetorical sections (Introduction and Discussion) of the texts under investigation. To calculate their frequencies, AntConc, a concordance programme was used. Moreover, using SPSS version 22, chi-square tests were run to check whether there were statistically significant differences in the use of hedges and boosters in the three sub-corpora. The results of data analysis showed statistically significant differences in the use of both hedges and boosters and their types throughout the two rhetorical sections among the three groups of authors. In the light of the results, pedagogical implications are provided and discussed in detail.