WRITING CENTER TUTOR PERCEPTIONS OF ADJECTIVE INTENSIFIER USAGE IN MULTILINGUAL UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT WRITING

In this dissertation, I examined the usage of adjective intensifiers in the academic writing of multilingual undergraduate university students in an English as a foreign language (EFL) context in the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) and then interviewed writing center tutors about their perceptions of the social meaning and appropriateness of using adjective intensifiers in academic writing. Adjective intensifiers are lexical items in English with a great deal of variation. These forms carry social meaning that can be used rhetorically by writers to portray an identity to the reader. I examined the usages of very, totally, absolutely, pretty, so, quite, really, and extremely and found that very is used far more than any other adjective intensifier in the academic writing of multilingual undergraduate university students. The findings also indicated that writing center tutors recommend against using adjective intensification in academic writing in general due to its vagueness while accepting only adjective intensifiers that indicate more completeness, like extremely, for usage in academic writing.