Hedges and boosters in the Yemeni EFL undergraduates' persuasive essay: An empirical study

• Main Authors: Alward, Ali S., Chua, Choon Mooi, Bidin, Siti Jamilah
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: L Education (General)
• Online Access: http://repo.uum.edu.my/9310/1/34-01.pdf; http://repo.uum.edu.my/9310/; http://www.educ.utas.edu.au/users/tle/JOURNAL/

The majority of research into EFL writing was on the area of linguistic competency (i.e. mastery of gram-mar and lexis).However, there is a need for investigating other pragmatic aspects of writing such as hedges and boosters which have not received the attention they deserve in the learners' written discourse.The key reason for investigating these two markers stemmed from the assumption that linguistic competency does not ensure that a piece of writing is satisfactory.This paper attempts to examine the role of explicit instruction on the learners’ use of hedges and boosters.The instrument selected for this study consists of a persuasive writing task written by forty third-year undergraduate students majoring in English at Sana’a University.The writing persuasive task was recommended as an appropriate instrument to collect such type of data.The findings revealed that prior instruction had a positive impact on the learners’ use of hedges and boosters.The subjects of the experimental group had a significant improvement while the subjects of the control group did not.Based on the findings of the study, it is strongly recommended that teaching hedges and boosters is a useful way for EFL learners.