Cautious language

The ability to use cautious language when writing demonstrates that a language student is maturing in his or her ability to manipulate ideas and words with more skill. It is a mark of an inexperienced or lower level student that statements and opinions are expressed in the strongest terms. This lessens the quality and authority of their writing by opening it to challenge from the reader.

In class we analysed a piece of text for evidence of cautious language. The predominant method modifying the strength of a statement is by using modals. There are a number of other language features that can be used for this purpose as well, (such as verb clauses, adjectives/adverbs, and noun phrases). We then did some sentence exercises, which we modified some statements from informal to formal, and from inappropriately strong to more moderate.

I have frequently found that students can complete exercises correctly, but they don't always find it as easy to transfer there knowledge into their own writing, so as an exercise I asked the students to write a paragraph in which they showed that they could use the cautious language that I had taught them in class.

For each nationality I discussed in class the reasons that certain things happened. For my Chinese students I asked them to discuss the reasons why there are now less students coming to NZ to study English than there were a few years ago. For other nationalities we discussed the reasons that there are more students choosing to study English in NZ.

For those of you who might be interested to see the results of this exercise you can click on the links below and read the students ideas.

http://okhranaxp.blogspot.com
http://hehediary.blogspot.com
http://bannsuan.blogspot.com