Open Conference Systems, Language and Language Teaching Conference 2022

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LEXICAL HEDGES USE IN SPOKEN LANGUAGE: EVIDENCE FROM PRE-SERVICE EFL TEACHERS’ TEACHING SIMULATIONS
Lautan Elsadhani, Made Frida Yulia

Building: Day 2 Parallel 3
Room: Room 5
Date: 2022-11-05 10:15 AM – 11:15 AM
Last modified: 2022-11-03

Abstract


Lexical hedges are known as language features which represent uncertainty. Over the years, hedges have been extensively studied, and their function is shown to go beyond expressing uncertainty. Therefore, learning the functions of lexical hedges in individuals' language will be valuable in understanding language as it is part of daily communication. This research aimed to identify the use of lexical hedges in pre-service EFL teachers' spoken language. In this study, two research questions were formulated: (1) What lexical hedges are found in pre-service EFL teachers' spoken language? (2) What are the possible functions of pre-service EFL teachers' use of lexical hedges in their spoken language? To answer the research questions, document analysis was applied, and twelve transcripts of pre-service EFL teachers' teaching simulations were used. In analysing the data, the researcher used the lexical hedges framework from Svarova (2008), Riekkinen (2009), and Varma and Tan (2015). The analysis showed all types of lexical hedges were found in the data. The most frequent type of lexical hedges used by pre-service EFL teachers was modal verbs, and the least frequent one was lexical verbs. Meanwhile, the possible functions of pre-service EFL teachers' use of lexical hedges were varied depending on the types.