EXPLORING THE USE OF HEDGING IN ACADEMIC WRITING

: A Comparative Analysis.

Abstract

English students in Indonesia have obviously dealt with a tremendous number of scientific researches. Yet, research does not only engage with the content, methods, and results of a study but also with the way it is presented to grab readers’ positive acceptance. It also strongly counts on how all of the elements of the study are presented and how the researchers position themselves on the study. One way to arrive at those points is by employing hedges. The aim of this research is to analyze the use of hedging in academic writing across various University in Makassar. The data were taken from some website English journal in Makassar. The collected data analyzed using linguistic analysis software, namely AntConc. The analysis involved categorizing and quantifying the frequency and types of hedging expressions used in the selected academic texts.  The research indicated that the student's research publications contained 146 hedging approaches. Of the six types of hedging that were identified, the students used modal auxiliary verbs to hedge the most frequently when they published their research articles with over 93 concordances. The term "modal auxiliary" was used 56 times in "research article 1". Not a single one of the four study articles that were located used this hedging.