hedging is a multi-purpose rhetorical strategy which is usually used in scientific arguments to secure ratification of claims, reduce the risk of negation, avoid conflict, manage disagreement and leave room for the audience to assess presented information. hedges are frequently used in research articles to mitigate the findings of research endeavors. the present research aims to investigate the types and frequency of hedges in discussion sections of two important genres of applied linguistics research articles i.e. qualitative and quantitative. to this end, a total of 100 articles from the most popular applied linguistic journals are collected (50 qualitative and 50 quantitative research articles) and analyzed in terms of types of hedges as well as their frequency. the hedge words were recognized based on the taxonomy suggested by hyland (1996). the results were analyzed through independent sample t-tests. the results indicate that there is a significant difference between discussion sections of qualitative and quantitative articles considering both the total number of hedge words (p =.000) and the subcategories based on hyland (1996) taxonomy, namely, reliability (p =.002), attribute (p = .003), writer oriented (p =.001) and reader oriented (p =.000). based on the results, it can be suggested that hedging is genre specific, at least as far as the qualitative and quantitative research genres are considered.