EAP is ELF?
eannegrenoble made an interesting remark in one of the other topics that >most EAP work is in fact ELF<. Is it the case that in EAP we are teaching a basic repertoire of language that will allow academics to communicate worldwide for their own professional purposes? We are not really teaching a language with its own culture. What do you think?
I think all languages have norms of politeness - in English we call this hedging - and we do it with specific words. Other cultures would recognise the concept of politeness but it would take different forms, e.g. ways of addressing people. Perhaps this is the best way to explain it to our students so they can see why academics need to hedge to mainain their face in their discourse community.
It is a shame but a fact that the most prestigious journals are the English language journals and you are absolutely right that most academics want to publish there. But that takes me back to the ELF idea. I do not think we are teaching Anglo Saxon culture but the culture of research articles in academic journals.
Hi,Olwyn,
I don't agree that hedging is a form of politeness, although it is to do with avoiding loss of face. Surely it's justified caution -- an important principle in communicating research findings. Writers use it to indicate their degree of commitment to a proposition. They hedge because they know they are on uncertain ground and want to signal this to pre-empt an attack. Without these shades of grey it would be difficult to discuss matters at the frontiers of knowledge. Everything would be in black and white.
Sue
Interesting ideas! By 'hedging' do we mean caution?
By hedging I was referring the convention in Anglo-Saxon academic circles of not stating that something is the case but rather stating that it could be argued that something might be the case. We could call that 'caution'.
I suspect that other academic communities around the world may not find it so difficult to state more baldly that something is true if they believe it to be so.
However, if they use that style when writing for 'internationally respected journals' they are likely to be rejected. And I guess it would be fair to say that it's because they can't 'write like a hedging Anglo-Saxon'.
Don't get me wrong; I think hedging is fine. It comes naturally to me. But it does not to some, and if they want to be successful internationally they are obliged to re-educate themselves.
I'm not seeing any connection here with ELF. I'm seeing a world in which one style has, rightly or wrongly, become more or less obligatory.
It might be more noticeable in some disciplines than others. I just had a quick look at three papers on robotics and visual imaging and found only one, 'suggests'. Is it likely to be more evident in Social Sciences?
May possibly be more common in Social Sciences.
What do others think?
I wonder whether hedging interacts with positivist and interpretivist leanings of disciplines and, possibly, of writers within those disciplines. I'm not basing this on any empirical insights, but I'd guess that as you move towards the science/positivist/quantitative end of the academic spectrum you might see less hedging (unless it's in the suggested implications of findings etc.
I think you might be right, Steve. A few years ago I did a little data gathering exercise with data by giving lecturers in my university a set of slightly dodgy data (languages on the Internet) and asking them to write a commentary. I found that the social scientists wrote a lot more than the scientists, questioned the provenance of the data more and hedged a lot more about possible interpretations.
I think scientists do hedge but they rely more on showing that their methodology is robust so the results do not need to be hedged. Ian Bruce wrote about this in a recent article in ESP Journal in which he compared results sections in research papers in Sociology, where results are presented in ways that allow for different interpretations, and in chemistry, biochemistry and medicine, where results are presented much more precisely but are often linked to justification of the methods used.
I talked about this at Cardiff IATEFL conference in 2009 and I see that the talk is still available at http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2009/sessions/63/who%E2%80%99s-afraid-d...
Suresh Canagarajah suggests that the typical IMRD structure of empirical research reports emerges from the 'marketisation' of ideas and the culture of the battle for publication in the Western model of academia. The research nice, provided up front in the introductory section, for example, Canagarajah (and others) see as reflecting this almost salesman-like writing culture.
Within this frame, perhaps hedging might be interpreted as tempering the extent to which your findings/suggestions/etc are 'New and Improved!', 'Never Seen Before!' or 'Buy Now While Stocks Last!' material !!!
There would seem to be nothing more typically Anglo-Saxon than hedging and the language used for doing it.
Do other cultures go in for hedging? To what extent? If they do not, and we teach the language of hedging whilst emphasising how important it is (to whom?), we are surely 'teaching', or rather, imposing, Anglo-Saxon culture.
But then, aren't we actually being helpful? Don't all those would-be academics we are teaching desperately want to publish in journals from the US/UK?