Investigating Hedging Awareness and Usage in MA Applied Linguistics Dissertations: A Corpus-Based Mixed-Methods Study

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate hedging awareness and use among Libyan MA students of Applied Linguistics in their dissertation writing. The study examines the frequency and effectiveness of hedging, the extent of students' awareness of the strategy, and the factors that shape their understanding and application of it. The study adopted a convergent mixed-methods design that combined a corpus analysis of the General Recommendations sections of 55 MA dissertations (12,395 words, 2014–2024) with a validated 37-item questionnaire completed by 72 postgraduate students, and a qualitative analysis of open-ended responses. The corpus results show that hedging was frequent, reaching 46.07 hedges per 1,000 words (571 tokens in total), yet narrowly realized. Modal and semi-modal verbs accounted for 73.9% of all hedges, and the single modal should alone have occurred 225 times, representing 53.3% of modal use, while epistemic adverbs (0.5%) and framing phrases (2.6%) were almost entirely absent. The questionnaire findings corresponded with this pattern. A large majority of participants (83.3%) recognized the importance of hedging for credible academic writing, and the corpus itself showed hedging to be sharply uneven: when the 55 dissertations were divided into equal thirds by density, the highest-density third contained roughly 43.5% of all hedge tokens, about three times the share (14.6%) held by the lowest-density third, although reported awareness rarely translated into rhetorical variety. Participants attributed this gap to the absence of explicit instruction (M = 2.78 on a five-point scale), to Arabic first-language norms that favour directness, and to an ethical reluctance to soften claims they considered deserving plain statement. The study concludes that awareness without explicit teaching produces habitual rather than strategic hedging, and recommends corpus-informed, culturally responsive instruction that widens the hedging repertoire of postgraduate writers and strengthens the credibility of their academic voice