A Pragmatic and Semantic Analysis of EFL Learners’ Use of Modal Verbs: A Perception Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The current study, which employed a new analysis approach -an explicit and implicit data collection method-, investigates the perception of the English modal verbs by forty-six Saudi EFL undergraduate learners. Findings revealed that Saudi EFL students struggled with the semantic functions of English modals more than the pragmatic ones. Deontic possibility modal verbs like can and might were the most challenging forms for the EFL learners. Functional complexity, input frequency, students’ L1 influence, and cultural variation were thought to cause students’ misunderstanding of these modals. Students, on the other hand, appeared to perceive the pragmatic functions with ease, reinforcing the role of the input frequency in the acquisition of English modality because modals of Request, Suggestion and Offer are frequently introduced to students in the classroom. Furthermore, findings revealed that students’ performance in the perception test was better than the explicit one, which could be attributed to the lack of explicit instruction of the English modals. Some pedagogical implications were suggested.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".