Learners’ awareness of hedges and boosters in academic discourse – a study on Serbian agriculture students

The paper focuses on the extent to which ESP students are able to distinguish the authors’ commitment towards a claim on the continuum from uncertainty to certainty in academic writing. Relying on Hyland’s extensive research in the field, we seek to explore whether hedges and boosters, being on the very ends of the mentioned continuum, represent items (in)visible to ESP students. Study participants were bachelor’s and master’s degree students of the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Belgrade, Serbia (N=91). They filled out the questionnaire, asking them to first assess the author’s degree of commitment (certainty, probability, possibility) in 15 sentences modeled on authentic sentences from RAs, and then state the words/expressions in each sentence that led them to make such a choice. The results reveal that students in both groups are better at recognizing certainty markers than those of probability and possibility. Although master’s degree students received prior instruction on the concept of hedges and boosters, there are no significant differences between the two groups in terms of achievement. Nevertheless, achievement in both groups is largely affected by the participants’ level of proficiency.