Introducing metadiscourse in EFL teaching in upper secondary school: A focus on hedging

This paper illustrates some teaching activities for introducing hedging in argumentative writing within English as a Foreign Language (EFL) upper secondary school classes.
After introducing the concepts of metadiscourse and hedging, we give a short overview of studies on the use of hedges in EFL students’ writing. Although many hedge words are introduced early on in EFL syllabi, these structures are particularly hard to master given their pragmatic nature and the lack of systematic form-meaning correspondences. For this reason, we propose a set of awareness-raising activities to be implemented with intermediate and upper-intermediate students based on common hedges per CEFR level and on the illustration-interaction-induction teaching method.