Formation of Foreign Language Hedging Competencies in the Context of Academic Writing

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of teaching academic writing as a concept of academic literacy of students, undergraduates, graduate students in higher education. Violation of the norms of academic writing is a common practice among both foreign language and domestic authors. This results from the fact of poor acquired and often lack of possession of formal stylistic competencies that affect the quality of writing a clear, concise and convincing scientific text. As the title implies, the aim of the article is to present the technology that avoids traditional errors when working on a scientific text. The need to follow the specific tone of the genres of academic writing, dictating the choice of words and phrasing, is especially noted. The technology of teaching hedging is proposed as a system of sequential operations (algorithm) for solving the stated problem. The algorithm for the formation of hedging competencies acquaints students of all levels in higher education with the genres and style of formal writing, teaches them to construct their own knowledge in academic discourse. In addition, the goal was to develop hedging competencies and to use foreign language lexical phenomena in academic writing genres, which may help to warn authors against typical stylistic errors. This work may be of interest both for students of all levels in higher education and for researchers-beginners, since the article discusses the international requirements for the writing of academic scientific documents that may be useful while preparing a foreign publication. The recommendations made as a result of the research may also arouse the interest of teachers of foreign languages, draw attention to the problem of academic writing and integrate them into the course of the profile discipline. This, in its turn, may help to meet the requirements to the quality of specialists training at universities, including scientific work support of students of all levels.