English in the Dentistry Discipline: A learner corpus study of certainty and doubt

Abstract

The proposed paper details a contrastive interlanguage analysis (i.e. Granger, 1996) of metalinguistic features of certainty and doubt (following Hyland, 2000) in a one-million word corpus of L2 group research reports from 4th year dentistry students in their final year of English-in-the-discipline training. The paper explores whether these dentistry students are more or less certain in their claims than L2 writers taking freshman EAP courses (in the 350,000 word HKU-CAES learner corpus, Crosthwaite, 2015) or writers in the professional dentistry field (in a 1,000,000 word corpus derived from the disciplinary journal Community Dental Health). The results suggest that L2 writers are more certain in their claims than in general EAP or in the professional data, as evidenced by a significantly higher proportion of boosters and comparatively infrequent use of hedging devices. The authors suggest that as the L2 writers feel under intense pressure to show that their research projects have been successful (in order to pass the course), this pressure is reflected in an overly optimistic appraisal of the importance of their research findings. Implications for the pedagogy of English-in-the-discipline courses are also discussed.