Belouettar, HaneneMesbahi, AmenaAzeroual, Djihed2020-01-302020-01-302019http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/9009A growing body of evidence suggests that the rhetorical devices of hedging and boosting are crucial to the construction of an authorial stance in a world of academia, however, the implementation of such devices is subject to influence by several factors among which the type of the research design. With respect to English Foreign Language learners at Larbi Ben M'hidi University, the present study is called for in a bid to discover if learners' use of hedges and boosters is dependent on the adopted research methodology. To achieve this end, a contextual analysis of these devices is carried out on a corpus comprised of 50 discussion sections (25 experimental and 25 non-experimental) drawn from master theses. A robust computational toolkit, AntConc, is used to record the frequencies of the different types of hedges and boosters across the two corpora relying on Hinkel's (2005) pre-established taxonomy by means of "Key Words In Context" concordance. To determine the significance of the results obtained, a Chi-Square test is run by means of SPSS. The findings demonstrate a statistically significant difference between experimental and non-experimental discussion sections with respect to both frequency and form of the employed hedges and boosters, however, a notable discrepancy is marked in the application of the two devices at the level of each stratum. On the basis of these findings, a number of pedagogical implications are offered and suggestions for further research are proposed.enCorpus analysisExperimental researchDiscussion sectionsOther