Stance Markers of Hedge and Booster to Construct Arguments in IELTS Essay Writings: A Genre Based-Study

Although stance markers of hedge and booster have been studied in academic writings and receiving growing concerns from linguistic scholars worldwide, most of them focused on analyzing these stance markers in research purposes, such as research papers, research theses, etc. However, studies on this area within essay writings is still limited, and none has investigated these stance markers within the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) essay writings. Understanding the importance of filling this need has encouraged me to analyze stance markers of hedge and booster within the IELTS essay writings by addressing three research focuses: the roles of these two stance markers in essay writings, the distribution of hedge and booster in essay writings, and the possibilities of these two stance markers appear in the same sentence. To realize this intention, this study used a genre approach by employing 30 IELTS essays bands 7, 8, and 9 as data sets, and they were analyzed using a mix method. The results revealed that stance markers of hedge and booster are important in these data set to show authorial stances in academic essays. Then, hedge appears more dominantly in band 7, while booster has higher numbers of appearance in band 8 and 9. Last, these two stance markers are possible appearing in the same sentence when the sentence contains multiple clauses. These findings imply that genre is much influenced by discourse communities because the present findings also become evident that the employment of hedge and booster seems to have differences from earlier different academic writings.