The purpose of this study is to see Korean EFL(English as Foreign Language) learners'' overall awareness of metadiscourse and pragmatic competence. For this, it examined 20 Ph. D theses and investigated the way in which they used hedges and boosters; 10 were written by Korean EFL students and the other 10 were written by English native research students. Due to the fact that the writing style can be affected by writers'' major, data were collected from 3 different fields; English language and literature, Business, Engineering. It used a corpus of over 2,000 pages and 0.54 million words.
The findings in the quantity analysis show that both Korean students and English native speakers use more hedges than boosters in their doctoral dissertation. As for using hedges, Korean EFL students employ more hedges than English native speakers. This result can be interpreted that Korean students are much conscious of readers'' evaluation, so they are cautious when they claim a proposition.
The quality analysis suggests that Korean EFL students and English native speakers have different preference of employing words. In the use of auxiliary, English native speakers prefer ‘may’, but Korean students like ‘should’ the most. The Korean students'' use of ‘should’ indicates their lack of pragmatic competence, because they use ‘should’ with the same meaning as ‘must’. In addition, Koreans do not prefer using ‘know’ and ‘think’ but intensively employ ‘show’. Moreover they frequently use impersonal phrase to indicate the proposition is not a personal opinion. Consequently, it can be said that Korean EFL students can not utilize diverse verbs and they are reluctant to write a strong assertion.
Through the use of hedges and boosters, Korean students reveal their pragmatic competence and vocabulary skills are not enough. It means they are not bad at English writing but unskilful at applying appropriate words in writing. To achieve better pragmatic competence, explicit education on the concept of metadiscourse and the pragmatic function of vocabulary not limited to dictionary meaning should be recommendable.