Language support for academic writing: exploring the use of hedges and boosters in student research and designing language interventions

Research has been embraced in the Philippines for many years now. In education, due to its importance among college students, the researcher aimed at knowing how far students know about devices that they use in research writing. The researcher had used descriptive interpretation by employing frequency count and independent sample t-test to compare the significant difference in the use of hedges and boosters between the two programs. Hedges and boosters were sourced out from a total enumeration of 41 research papers from both programs, 31 from BSED and 10 from BEED. The most frequently used hedging devices in the research papers both introduction and conclusion sections of BSED Program are Type III. “This study” ranked as first, “It” ranked as second, “The study” ranked as third, and “may”, a Type I hedging device, ranked as fourth whereas in BEED program, “It” ranked as no. 1, “This study” ranked as no. 2, and “The study” ranked as no. 3. The most used boosting device in both BSED and BEED programs is “should”.  The most used hedging device across all programs is “This study”. The boosting device, “should”, gained the highest number of use and ranked as the most frequently used booster. This study rejects the claim that there is significant difference in the frequency of the use of hedges and boosters when grouped according to program.  The language intervention activities constructed by the researcher were directly compared against the result of the study. These activities are as follows: lecture about metadiscoursal devices, scouting hedges and boosters in authentic materials, debate, essay writing, and feature article writing.  In conclusion, the study of hedges and boosters helps to portrait an important component of academic argument since claims and argumentation are tried to be included by writers in their academic writing (Bruce, 2005, as cited in Tran, 2013). The language intervention activities might be of big help to these students after all both programs will mandate their 4th year students to write research paper, an academic write-up, as a requirement for graduation.