ACTIVITIES TO FOSTER THE USE OF HEDGING BY ENGLISH LANGUAGE STUDENTS

Resumen

Introduction: In today’s interconnected world, academic writing plays a crucial role since it allows professionals and scientists to disseminate their research and findings in their fields. Academic writing exhibits six main features: it is complex, formal, objective, explicit, hedged, and responsible. Hedges are linguistic devices which writers use to present statements with accuracy and caution, without commitment, and protecting themselves from the audience’s criticism. Despite its confirmed importance, hedging has received less attention leading to the lack of knowledge about this linguistic resource and its inadequate use. Students of the course English Language with a Second Foreign Language (French)  at Universidad Central “Marta Abreu” de Las Villas are faced with this problem since they have not received enough training about how to hedge in academic writing.

Objetive: propose a set of activities to help these students to properly hedge in academic writing. Theoretical, empirical and statistical methods were used in the study. The results showed the necessity of fostering student’s academic writing skills and hedging designing and implementing more activities on hedging. The activities proposed may be considered a contribution to the enhancement of the students’ academic writing skills