III.3 - PROBABLE SOURCES OF MODAL
MISUSE AND MISUNDERSTANDING
The fact that students confuse meanings, or have tendency, or
fail to use right modals or right meanings or even avoid using modals has
multiple sources. The causes may be psychosocial, psychological or mere
ignorance.
Ignorance can be a source of the misuse of modals because if a
student has never met a modal or one of the meanings of modals, it is obvious
that he will not be able to use the modals appropriately. For example, if a
student doesn't know what is giving permission it is normal that he
uses WILL to express it. In our data, 22.58% students did so. Ignorance can
also be attributed to the fact that students have forgotten what they have
learnt in secondary school. They may had known what modals express and how
meanings are expressed but the lack of reading and practice may urge them to
forget modals; this may account for the low participation in the tests. Of
course, the misuses can be due to other factors.
If we look at the lack of mastery of modals from a
psychosocial angle, some external agents to students may favor the
misunderstandings or misuses of modals.
First of all, students may have been induced to errors by
their peers. While doing the test, students may have ignored some modals or
meanings and asked their peers to help them. The misleading can have happened
before the test or during the test. It may have happened during the test if the
student has attempted to cheat (some students did group work though they were
told not to do so). The misleading may have happened before the test if
students have been told so by a peer or by a teacher.
The relation between the teacher and the students is our
second concern in the psychosocial point of view. Indeed, students' misuse of
modals or misunderstanding of meanings can be attributed to teachers if the
latter taught the former erroneous meanings or if they failed to teach what
they had to. On the one hand, if the teacher himself doesn't master modals, he
will teach them erroneously and students will learn them defectively. On the
second hand, if the teacher does not explain the context of use of modals and
make students aware of the pragmatic meanings of modals, students will not be
able to use them appropriately.
The third aspect in our psychosocial reasons is the
interference of the mother tongue or French. We know that the testees are EFL
learners; so, they may be transferring the French modality system to English or
the modality system of their mother tongues since modality exist in all
languages but it is not expressed in the same way in all of them. A contractive
analysis of English modals and native languages modality systems would be
helpful to clear this point. Though other people may induce students to make
errors in the use and understanding of modals, students can misinterpret modals
by themselves. This may be due to their psychology.
The analysis of the data springs us to think that some
psychological reasons lead students to produce modals or to give them some
kinds of meanings. For instance, we have found that students have a deontic
tendency. This allows us to say that students pay more attention to social
events than to logic and mathematics. Their education may have conducted them
to be inclined to social use of modals. Furthermore, although we did not want
to do a comparative study between the use of modals by girls and by boys, the
recurrent occurrence of some elements struck our mind. We found that most of
the girls said that CAN expresses permission while most of boys said
that CAN expresses possibility. That makes us think that girls said so
because they are educated as housewives and they implicitly recognize the
existence of some authority to whom they will have to ask for permission. As
for boys, we think that they said so because they believe in power, strength
and accomplishment of their beliefs. We think that if there are differences
according to gender, the differences may be due to the fact that the psychology
of girls is different from that of boys.
In the end of our research there is evidence that students
have many difficulties to understand the meanings of modals and to use modals
appropriately, that there are more difficulties between the kinds of meanings
than within the types of meanings, that the difficulties exist more in the
deontic meanings, that few students use modals haphazardly, and that the causes
of misuses and misunderstandings are various.
However, in spite of the variety of sources and the miscellany
of difficulties, some suggestions can be made to improve the level of students
in the use and the understanding of modals. This is our concern in the
following chapter.
CHAPTER FOUR: RATIONALE OF
MODALS TEACHING AND LEARNING AND SOME SUGGESTIONS
Our suggestions are primarily addressed to teachers because
they are the mainspring of language teaching and learning system. They receive
instructions from textbook designers and from language teaching and learning
trainers. They have on charge to make students learn the language at the best.
Students can also benefit from these suggestions because they can be inspired
by our propositions. Textbooks designers and teacher supervisors can also
benefit from these suggestions since the former can consider them in their
textbooks and the latter in their training. Of course, researchers may evaluate
the efficiency of our propositions.
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