METADISCOURSE MARKERS OF HEDGING IN CLASSROOM INTERACTION: A DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS

Abstract

This study investigates the types of hedging employed in classroom interactions, the metadiscourse markers or linguistic items that are used to realize hedging and the pragmatic roles hedging play in the interactions. Hedging is basically used to mitigate the force of illocution in a speech act and soften the certainty or commitment of a speaker to the value of proposition. It has come to be accepted as an indispensable tool in interpersonal communication. Data for the study were 30 minutes each of 18 lessons of four English language tutors in a College of Education in the Western North Region of Ghana. In all, 540 minutes of classroom interactions were recorded using audio-tapes and note taking during the second semester of the 2020/2021 academic year. The data were analysed based on the framework of Salager-Mayers (1995) taxonomy of hedges cited in Mansour & Alghazo (2021). The results reveal that 10 classes of hedging are adopted in classroom interaction, the predominant ones being the modal auxiliary verbs, modal lexical verbs and adverbial phrases/approximates. It was also discovered that hedging are used for purposes such as placing emphasis on a point, attaining politeness and expressing lack of commitment to a proposition. However, given the limited number of teachers and classroom lessons processed in this study, the outcome needs to be confirmed by the analysis of a wider corpus of classroom interactions.