earticle

영어

This study aims to examine the use of hedges in L2 college students’ writings and see whether the genre of writing affects their use of hedges. The proper use of hedges is particularly problematic discourse feature of L2 writing. The study, therefore, analyzes the use of hedges in L2 college students’ writings of five different genres; narrative, comparison, cause-effect, argumentative, and reaction essays. The results show that Korean writers generally tend to be affected by different genres when they write English essays, so they use hedging items with epistemic meanings differently between narrative and expository genres. Suggestions were made for using computer corpora in understanding EFL learners’ language difficulties and helping them develop communicative and pragmatic competence. The findings also give some pedagogical implications for teaching strategies to raise genre-specific as well as culture specific awareness in L2 writings.