The use of hedging in students’ research proposal at English Teacher Education Department UIN Sunan Ampel Surabaya

Hedging is the expression of vagueness that writers use to mitigate the strength of their statement and claim. Hedging is used as the strategy to convey the arguments appropriately to build a good academic writing. As the academics, students of English Teacher Education Department of UIN Sunan Ampel Surabaya are obligated to write academic writing in the form of research proposal as the requirement to get a bachelor degree and they will convey their arguments and claims about the certain topic in their research proposal. This study aims to know what types of hedging used in the students’ research proposal and what the students’ purposes of using hedging. Qualitative method is used in this study. Five research proposals were analyzed by doing document analysis to gain the first data. Interview with the students whose research proposals were analyzed was also hold to get the second data. Based on finding and discussion, the result showed the students of English Teacher Education Department used four types of hedging in their research proposal namely attribute hedge, reliability hedge, writer oriented hedge and reader oriented hedge. In addition, the result also showed that reliability hedge the most frequent hedging used and reader oriented hedge is the lowest frequent hedging used in students’ research proposal. Furthermore, the result from the second data revealed that students generally do not have any purpose of using hedging in their research proposal. Only one from the five students who has the purpose of using hedging in her research proposal that is to make the statements become vaguer by reducing the exactness of her claim and show the possibility of the truth so that she is avoided from the responsibility if the statement is found being wrong later