Hedging and Boosting Sensitivity in EFL Students’ Timed-Handwriting

Effective use of hedging and boosting is a key aspect of academic writing, enabling writers to express their stance, manage interpersonal meaning, and align with academic discourse norms. Although these rhetorical strategies are well documented in L2 academic and research writing, their application in timed handwritten compositions, particularly among EFL learners in Southeast Asia, remains underexplored. This study fills that gap by examining how EFL university students from Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines use hedges and boosters in handwritten essays produced under time constraints. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, the study analyzed 60 compositions using descriptive quantitative analysis to identify frequency patterns and qualitative content analysis to interpret contextual usage. The findings reveal that students display a functional awareness of modality, with hedging mainly realized through adjectives like about and modal verbs like maybe, reflecting caution and generalization avoidance. Boosting was heavily dominated by the adverb always, with less frequent use of definitely and indeed to emphasize certainty and conviction. Although students showed sensitivity in applying these strategies, the overuse of familiar forms and limited structural variety suggests surface-level adaptation rather than advanced rhetorical control—an effect attributed to the cognitive demands of timed writing. The study concludes that explicit instruction in hedging and boosting is crucial for fostering rhetorical awareness, especially in high-stakes or time-limited tasks. It recommends further research into cultural influences, proficiency development, and genre-specific modality use to better support EFL learners’ academic writing competence.