Frequency and Types of Hedges and Boosters in Academic Medical and Teaching Research Articles

To gain an in-depth insight and to achieve greater precision in the reasoning and writing of academic papers, the present study investigated the types, frequencies of hedges and boosters used in Iranian and foreign academic Medical and Teaching research articles (RAs).

This descriptive-analytical study included 60 research articles. Iranian articles on English language teaching about new methods of teaching English were selected from the journals indexed in Scopus. By searching in PubMed, the national medical articles which were interventional were chosen. Foreign articles related to these two fields were also selected from journals indexed in the ISI with impact factors>1. They were analyzed according to Holmechr('39')s classification of lexical devices through focusing on hedge and booster words and using Chi-square test.

The results showed a significant difference in the use of hedges and no significant difference in the use of boosters among the words used in academic papers, indicating the incorrect use of these hedge and booster vocabularies by non-native authors in writing academic articles.

The analysis suggested that the overall percentage of hedges in the Teaching RAs was higher than Medical RAs so that their improper use by authors has unpleasant consequences in the development of English writing skills for academic articles.