A Study on Error Analysis & Hedging Expressions of Medical Research Abstracts

Error analysis plays an important role because understanding the types of errors can give a better opportunity for both teachers and learners to recognize the nature of errors and ways of preventing them. This study looks into errors in the medical research abstracts written by 26 Koreans and also examines hedging expressions since hedging can be a necessary tactic in which the validity and objectivity of their claims is conveyed. The hedging expressions of these research abstracts are to be compared with those of Hyland (1996)'s study done on ENL academic writers of cell and molecular biology. The results of the study reveal that wrong word choice was the most commonly occurred errors, followed by prepositions, articles, adding and missing words. Many of these errors, except articles, seemed to derive from the native language interference. There were also run-on sentences, subject & verb agreement, tense, word order and minor errors. As for hedging, ESL medical writers seemed to use very limited hedging expressions and inappropriately strong modals. It is recommended to take variations of hedges using epistemic adverbials and adjectives to present their claims in a more valid and polite way. Limited verb choice was also noted. As for preventing or minimizing similar future errors, collocation practices in ESP focused on commonly used medical related words and expressions can be effective.