modal auxiliaries

Hedging academic claims has been recognized as one of integral pragmatic features of academic writing in which most EFL academic writers seem to face substantial problems. Explicit instruction has been proposed by some scholars as an effective approach to make EFL writers aware of the importance, different forms, and pragmatic functions of hedging devices some of which are polysemous and polypragmatics (e.g., Hyland 1996a). The present study with the aim of shedding more light on the effectiveness of explicit instruction in improving the pragmatic knowledge of Iranian EFL learners in terms of hedging devices, investigates the acquisition and use of English modal auxiliaries as hedging strategies via applying a direct teaching strategy in the classroom. To this end a sample of 37 undergraduate students majoring in different fields of study were recruited and assigned into a control and experimental group. Explicit instruction of the modal auxiliaries as hedging resources was applied for the treatment group while the control group received only the regular academic writing instruction. A pretest and a posttest were administered to the two groups. The descriptive analysis of the scores as well as the results of the t-tests revealed a significant progress in the participants’ linguistic and pragmatic knowledge of modal auxiliaries as hedges in the treatment group. The results also indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control group in acquiring and using modal verbs to hedge their claims. The findings of the study provide insightful implications for the administrators of educational programs.

The major objective of this experimental research was to assess the differences between two varieties of focus on form instruction, namely proactive and reactive across multimodal vs. traditional input settings in both comprehension and production of modal auxiliaries. The participants of the study were 75 Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) high school students at the elementary level in three classes. The students in each class took part in a pre-test including both comprehension and production items. Then, they were randomly exposed to one of the three types of grammar instruction, i.e. proactive focus on form in which students were exposed to multimodal input through preplanned techniques of input enhancement and input flood, reactive focus on form in which the tasks occurred in multimodal episodes including negotiation and correction by the instructor through recasts, clarification requests, and repetition techniques. Lastly, in the control group, the students were provided with a pamphlet and their teacher’s explanations. The post-test was then administered to the three groups, and the results were analyzed by conducting a one-way-analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) which revealed a significant difference among these three groups. The results showed that the proactive group outperformed the reactive and control groups both in the comprehension and production of modal auxiliaries. At the end of the experiment, a brief survey which was accomplished through an interview revealed that the majority of the students highly favored PowerPoint presentations, teacher's explanations, and video clips respectively.