Abstract

This research article would turn over an attempt made to investigate why certain composition students could not interact with employing some hedging structures (usually defined as claim-mitigating markers). This inability would negatively affect developing confidence required to enhancing written and oral communication when using English with others. Two main reasons behind the students’ inability to use most of the types of hedging structures have been found out to be their failure to recognize the hedge functional constrains due to the issue that hedges are not incorporated as an essential subject in their composition textbooks and the focus of teaching them has been on their syntactic and semantic functions—not on their pragmatic one. This situation has cogently been supported by means of further research and analyzing the students’ performance reflected on their academic quizzes.

This article would also subsume a suggestive methodology given to a sample of Jubail-Industrial-College students to cope with hedging structures where they received condensed training dealing with defining hedges, usage motivation, and a concise taxonomy under the power of a blend of socio-pragmatic strategies. The training would be found to reflect a positive feedback confirmed by the analysis of their post-training performance which has revealed some improvement. Practical recommendations would follow the findings, which could be up for discussion.

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