Doubt and Certainty in Student Presentations

The expression of doubt and certainty is one of the central issues to the interactive feature of spoken discourse. Thus, this study intended to study the expression of doubt and certainty through the realizations of hedge and booster markers, respectively, in English native student presentations. This study was run on a corpus of eleven student presentations taken from MiCASE corpus. The student presentations included, in total, 143373 words and 146 students were participated as speakers in the presentations. The presentations were analyzed for hedge and booster markers based on the available and recent taxonomies. The results highlighted greater practice of doubt in the student presentations that could be justified based on lack of content knowledge background of students to boost their claims and ideas. The common type of hedge markers was modal auxiliary verb. Concerning boosters, variety in realization was practiced where certainty was showed by the use of main verbs, adjective and adverb. This study stresses the need for explicit instruction on such issues to EFL students.