A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF HEDGES IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING RESEARCH ARTICLE’S DISCUSSION WRITTEN BY INDONESIAN PROFESSIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL PROFESSIONAL WRITERS

This research aimed to investigate the type of hedges frequently used by Indonesian
professional and international professional writers in the Research Article
Discussions (RADs) in English Language Teaching (ELT) journals. Moreover, this
research investigated the differences in the use of hedges in both groups of writers
viewed from the frequency of the occurrences of the hedges. This comparative study
employed a descriptive-quantitative method that used ten corpora as the samples of
this research taken from TEFLIN and IJAL journals. The sampling technique used in
this research was purposive. The data were analyzed using the taxonomy of hedges of
Hyland (2005), and the results were presented in frequency and percentage. The
results showed that Indonesian professional writers used more epistemic adverbs and
adjectives in their RADs, followed by modal auxiliaries and epistemic lexical verbs.
Meanwhile, international professional writers included more modal auxiliaries than
other types of hedges in writing their RADs, followed by epistemic adverbs and
adjectives and epistemic lexical verbs. Moreover, there is a different use of hedges in
the RADs written between Indonesian professional and international professional
writers in making claims. These findings imply that different writers' backgrounds
apply different writing strategies in positioning themselves to show their confidence
and the certainty of their claims in writing the RADs.
Keywords: English language teaching journals, hedges, Indonesian professional and
international writers, research article discussion.