Assess students' understanding of the pragmatic functions of hedging and stance markers in academic research articles by requiring identification and classification of hedges and stance expressions in excerpted texts; explanation of their communicative purposes (e.g., mitigating claims, expressing epistemic modality, aligning with or distancing from prior work, managing reader engagement); analysis of distribution across sections (introduction, methods, results, discussion) and disciplinary variation; and short applied tasks revising sentences to strengthen or soften stance. Focus: recognition, functional explanation, and evaluation of rhetorical effects in undergraduate-level discourse analysis.