Hedging like a professional: A corpus-driven approach to interactional metadiscourse in English learner academic writing

Abstract

The paper explores the phraseology of English academic texts written by Czech university students in comparison with English L1 novice and expert academic writing, focussing on hedging patterns. It combines contrastive analysis and learner corpus research, taking as its starting point recurrent multi-word patterns overused or underused by both groups of novice writers (e.g. it can be said that and it seems ADJECTIVE that/to, respectively), or by English L2 writers (e.g. as it seems) in comparison with L1 expert writers. The findings suggest that when expressing epistemic stance in their English academic papers, Czech university students have to face two types of challenge – the more prominent ‘academic’ challenge, i.e. the lack of academic experience, and, despite their proficiency, also the ‘linguistic’ EFL challenge.