The Use of Hedging Devices in Spoken Discourse by Turkish University Students

Abstract

This research sought to investigate Turkish university students’ use of hedging as regards to the function and meaning. The devices used in this study were ‘I mean’, ‘sort of/kind of’, ‘just’, ‘like’, ‘I think’, ‘I guess’, ‘I don’t know’, ‘you know’, ‘or something/or something like that’. These are ranked as the most frequently used ones according to Michigan Corpus of American Spoken English (MICASE) and Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE) corpora findings. A total number of 17 senior university students from the English Language Teaching (ELT) department of a major university in Turkey contributed to this study. A questionnaire developed by Kot (2015), including three main sections, was administered to the participants in order to disclose their attitudes and awareness of hedging devices in spoken texts. The findings showed that the ELT students were not actually aware of the function of hedging devices in spoken contexts although they reported to use them frequently both in L1 and L2 in the quantitative section of the questionnaire. This might refer to the deficiencies in the pragmatic aspects of teacher education approaches. Furthermore, this article provides insights into the pedagogical implications for language teacher education programs by building on the relevant literature.

Keywords

• hedging devices
• pragmatics
• teacher education
• yumuşatma sözcükleri
• edimbilim
• öğretmen eğitimi
• türk üniversite öğrencileri