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Hedges in Russian EAP writing: A corpus-based study of research papers in management

  • Elizaveta Smirnova

    Elizaveta Smirnova is now Associate Professor of Foreign Languages department at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Perm, Russia. Her areas of expertise and interest include EAP, ESP, corpus linguistics, learner corpora, functional grammar. Her works have also appeared in RELC Journal, Lingua, Metaphor and the Social World.

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    and Svetlana Strinyuk

    Svetlana Strinyuk works as Associate Professor of Foreign Languages department at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Perm, Russia. Her research interests are in Irish literature, teaching EAP and ESP, and corpus linguistics.

Published/Copyright: October 12, 2020

Abstract

The fact that English has become a lingua franca of academic communication has led to increased attention to teaching English for academic purposes (EAP) at the academia. Academic discourse markers, such as hedges, have been an important topic in academic writing research whose prime aim is helping non-Anglophone researchers to present their research findings in English for international publication. This study investigates the use of the most frequent hedging devices in a corpus of 58 works written by Russian university students and compares it to a corpus of articles published in peer-reviewed journals in business and management. The analysis of learner corpus data has provided evidence of how Russian ELF speakers use the language, showing significant differences between the use of hedges by the students and professional writers. The research has also highlighted a number of challenges which non-native learners face when writing academic texts. The study may contribute to a higher level of L2 academic writing in ELF contexts and have implications for creating EAP courses, research of second language acquisition and writing pedagogy.


Corresponding author: Elizaveta Smirnova, Foreign Languages Department, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Perm, Russia; and Universidade de Vigo, Vigo, Spain, E-mail:

Funding source: The Academic Fund Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in 2017- 2018 and the Russian Academic Excellence Project "5-100"

Award Identifier / Grant number: 17-05-0020

About the authors

Elizaveta Smirnova

Elizaveta Smirnova is now Associate Professor of Foreign Languages department at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Perm, Russia. Her areas of expertise and interest include EAP, ESP, corpus linguistics, learner corpora, functional grammar. Her works have also appeared in RELC Journal, Lingua, Metaphor and the Social World.

Svetlana Strinyuk

Svetlana Strinyuk works as Associate Professor of Foreign Languages department at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Perm, Russia. Her research interests are in Irish literature, teaching EAP and ESP, and corpus linguistics.

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Published Online: 2020-10-12
Published in Print: 2020-10-25

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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