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Student 3 :
“While NESTs not really pay attention in grammar, NNESTs give more detail in correcting the grammar.”
Student 8 :
“NNESTs are better in reading and speaking skills, and also grammar because they learn it, unlike NESTs who get it unconsciously.”
2.3 No Adjectival, Adverbial, Nominal Modal Phrase
Another missing hedges are adjectival, adverbial, nominal modal phrase. About 26.92 or 7 out of 26 sentences are found without this particular hedges. The students
seems to have limited vocabulary register relating to adjectival, adverbial, nominal modal phrase seeing that this particular lexical items were used less and when it could
actually be inserted in their statements.
Example: Student 2:
They have already read the book related to the material discussion in every meeting.
Student 4: Beside non-native English speaker teachers have more knowledge in
teaching English as foreign language; they also always do better preparation in teaching English in classroom.
3. Implication of the Missing of Hedges in Students ’ Writing
The following are some problems caused by the missing hedges. This also helps to describe the significance of hedging as an academic writing tool. I categorized the
implication of the problematic sentences in previous discussion into two kinds which are overgeneralization and reliability issues.
23
Table 10. Occurrence of Issues in the Students’ Writing
Overgeneralization Reliability Issues
5 21
Table 10 shows the occurrence of the issues. There are 5 cases of overgeneralization and 21 cases of reliability issues. Again, I would like to mention that the data were most
probably st udents’ very first experience in writing an academic context and presenting
their proposition of the chosen topic. So, although the issues caused by missing hedges is considered a minor problem of the whole content in their writing, still, students
should learn to be more cautious in order to escape the following risks.
3.1 Overgeneralization
Overgeneralization is the result of missing approximators as hedges in students’ writing. It is not a few of the students who carelessly omitted the device and
overgeneralized the statement. Unless they have precise number of data, it is better for them to hedge the number of subject being talked by using “imprecise quantifiers”
Hyland, 2003, p.191
Table 11. Examples of Hedged and Unhedged Proposition Approximators Hedged
– Approximators No Approximators
Student 1 : “
Many people use and
learn English as their communication tools since it is used
as a lingua franca.”
Student 8
:
“Since Native English teacher
[did] not have experience of
learning English as their second language, they [were] weak
, …”
