Resumen de Students’ Performance of Hedges in an English Medium Instruction Context: The Impact of Length of Study Abroad
Globalization along with the recent promotion of multilingualism has led to the progressive implementation of English as the medium for communication in the tertiary level. English Medium Instruction (EMI) has motivated research on teachers’ and students’ attitudes, students’ academic achievement and language and pragmatic outcomes (Taguchi, Naganuma and Budding, 2015; Ament and Pérez Vidal, 2015; Muthanna and Miao, 2015; Dafouz and Camacho-Miñano, 2016). Considering Brown and Levison’s (1978, 1987) politeness theory, the present study explores the performance of hedging in an EMI setting in Spain, addressing two research questions: (a) to what extent the performance of hedges occurs in students in EMI classrooms; and (b) whether stays abroad trigger learners performance of hedging. A total of twenty-four 130-150-word motivation letters were written where 19 year-old teenagers requested for an opportunity to conduct the internships in a specific company. As such, the taxonomy proposed by O’Keeffe, Clancy and Adolphs (2011) was applied in order to identify and classify the hedge forms in three subcategories in a database, followed by a bivariate correlation to observe if there existed a possible relation between the amount of hedge words and the time spent abroad. Findings from the exploratory study show that: (a) the frequency of the employed hedge words varied substantially among the hedging subcategories, being the most commonly used modal verbs followed by adverbs and verbs with modal meaning; and (b) the time spent abroad does not seem to have an effect on the performance of hedging in EMI students. Taking into account the findings of the present study, we suggest the need of instruction on hedging to draw learners’ attention to pragmatic learning when English is used as the medium of instruction.
