Exploring Gender Differences in the Use of Hedges in Pakistani Engineering Research

Abstract

Previous studies suggest significant differences in academic writing between gender-based studies and various disciplines. As, English for Academic Purpose (EAP) is used as the source of communication as “an international language” which not only reflects on readers and writers but its professional, social, cultural, linguistic and educational settlements also (Canagarajah, 2002). Hedges play important role in academic writing. For this, the aim of present study was to investigate the use of hedges in Pakistani engineering research articles on gender-based level. The present study examined Pakistani research articles from two disciplines of Civil engineering and Electrical engineering to find out the frequencies and functions of hedges on gender-based level. For this reason, Hyland and Tse’s (2004) Interpersonal model of metadiscourse was employed to identify the list of hedges and to see the similarities and differences in the use of hedges on gender-based level. The corpus was built of 100 research articles. The total number of articles was 100 from Civil engineering and Electrical engineering discipline consisting on male and female writers. For this study, mixed method (qualitative and quantitative) strategy was employed. Sampling of the study was probability and stratified sampling. For analysis, Anconc.3.4.4 (a concordance tool) was applied to find out the frequencies and differences in the use of hedges.