English Language Teaching: Teaching of Hedges

Abstract

A hedge is a mitigating word or sound used to lessen the impact of an utterance. It can be an adjective, for example, ‘Small potato me is not as strong as you’; or an adverb: ‘I maybe can swim faster than you’, while it can also consist of clauses, that it could be regarded as a form of euphemism which should be taught as a main topic in English class of schools around the world. For instance, in Hong Kong schools, based on my observation while teaching in a number of primary and secondary English courses as a tutor, students report that their school teachers usually emphasize the teaching of all cohesive devices in terms of skills of writing while they neglect to explain the importance of the use of hedges in order to show euphemism. In this study, I would adopt Corpus Linguistics, a division of applied linguistics, as methodology to discover a great deal of hedges employed by so-called native speakers of English, for promoting the idiomatic usage of hedges in writing, nevertheless in speaking, so as to help teachers gain resources and inspiration in teaching to students the appropriate English hedges as a consequence of the author’s hard effort while revealing from the selected corpora of this paper.