Hedging in Academic Writing: Cross-disciplinary Comparisons in the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP).

Abstract

Hedging has been a long-standing challenge for English learners. Emerging from the research on hedging in academic writing is the natural/social science dichotomy that hedging is more common in social sciences than in natural sciences. Yet, this line of research has been primarily based on a limited number of disciplines. To bridge this gap, this study compares sixteen disciplines to uncover the cross-disciplinary variation in hedging based on successful student writing captured by the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). Five types of hedging devices were investigated. The results suggest that hedging is more common in argumentation-driven disciplines than in the data-driven ones. Cross-disciplinary differences were also found between disciplines under the same division. The findings challenge assumptions and raise questions about the natural/social science dichotomy in academic writing, calling for discipline-specific instruction on hedging in teaching English for academic purposes. The study also demonstrates the affordances of corpus tools for data-driven teaching and computer-assisted language learning in remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.