Education and the Collective Construction of Knowledge

Santiago Mengual Andrés¹; Mayra Urrea Solano²

Hang Ferrer-Mora reflects in ‘Culturemes vs. humoremes as translation problems in practice exemplified in the German Cabaret of Marc-Uwe Kling and his Kangaroo stories’ about the manner in which culture, and humor in particular, influence translation. Nieves García-de-Frutos, Justo Alberto Ramírez-Franco & Raquel Antolín-López, in the chapter entitled ‘Is there homogeneity among business students regarding the level of concern towards the Sustainable Development Goals? A cluster analysis’, show the need to promote the development and awareness of university students about sustainability. ‘Use Trends and methodological pertinence of Delphi within educational research in Ibero-America: a systematic review in Scopus’ by Alexander López-Padrón & Rosabel Roig-Vila offers a systematic overview of the use patterns of the Delphi system. The chapter entitled ‘Gamification in the improvement of speaking competences in the English as a foreign language classroom: a case study’, by Martinez-Roig, Copelia Mateo-Guillén & Pedro Antonio García-Tudela discusses the value of gamification in learning English for primary education students. María del Mar Ramírez-Alvarado & Lorena R. Romero-Domínguez’s chapter entitled ‘Quality management in the Spanish university: an analysis of the success and performance rates in communication degree programs’ shows the benefits of systems of quality control and monitoring of university degrees. Finally, José Rovira-Collado, Francisco Antonio Martínez-Carratalá, Sebastián Miras & María A. Ribes-Lafoz in their ‘Teacher stories from the future: technology for the language and literature classroom’ present some of the results of their project ‘La educación en 2030’ (Education in 2030) and how education students imagine the technological transformation of their field in the future.

Hanane Benali Taouis¹; Sidoní López Pérez²

Modal verbs generally express a variety of semantic meanings the same as permission, possibility, intention etc., (Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries 2022). To recognize the complexity of these language elements, we should be aware of the possible variations encompassed in each modal verb and the relation that these meanings have with the attitude of the producer (Palmer 1979). In other words, modality depends not only on grammatical features but also on lexical and prosodic ones.

Basically, modal verbs are divided into three different categories including epistemic, dynamic and deontic modals. According to Palmer (1990), epistemic modality includes the speaker’s judgement about a proposition based on both evidence and knowledge. Deontic modality involves expressing obligation, permission, or forbiddance, whereas dynamic modality is concerned with the abilities and properties of the subject of the sentence. It is particularly important to mention that the modal verb we are analysing in the current investigation has been defined by many researchers (Palmer 1990; Portner 2009; Sweetser 1990) as carrying the three categories of modality. Thus, we can deduce its possible ambiguity for non-native speakers of English and expect it to be one of the most complicated modals in English.

Nevertheless, studies on the use of modal verbs by Spanish learners of English are very few and most of them are dissertations or theses. They all agreed on the difficulties faced by non-native students in using modal verbs. This makes our research relevant to the field of language teaching, but it also limits the scope of our theoretical background. In addition, and taking into consideration that most research on the use of modal verbs focuses on the writing of specific and standardized assignments by non-native students of English, another outstanding aspect of this research is the use of spontaneous learners’ written production extracted from activities in a non-linguistic subject (López Pérez & Benali Taouis 2019; López Pérez 2021).

2. Research method

2.1. Research objectives

This research that is a corpus analysis study that draws on a corpus-driven approach (Biber 2010) and concept-oriented approach (COA) to analyse the subject’s errors with the aim of providing insight into understanding the learning process (Bardovi-Harlig 1995, 2000; Dietrich, Klein, & Noyau 1995) and explaining the reasons behind the difficulties that our intermediate Spanish learners of English face with modal verbs. The choice of modal verbs is not arbitrary, but based on a deep analysis of the types of errors and on the results of previous studies in which modal verbs were included in the first ten most frequent errors of Spanish learners of English (MacDonald 2016). The main purpose of this research is to bring to light the errors that students make while using the modal verb must. A total of 166 hits were assigned with the token must and eight errors were analysed. Although the number of these errors is not very high, it demands our attention because it shows that students continue to make a wrong use of the structure that is required with modal verbs. These errors showed four categories of grammar errors. The analysis goes a step further to compare the structures of these errors with the students’ native language (NL) to the English grammatical rules to find the possible reasons. Basically, this corpus analysis study aims at detecting university Spanish Learners of English errors’ in the use of the modal verb must and provide pedagogical implications to improve the teaching of this linguistic aspect.

2.2. Participants

Our monolingual corpus, ENTECOR, (see Table 1 below) includes 786 participants, 527.099 tokens and 13.148 types. This comparable corpus encompasses two sub-corpora (TICOR & SECOR). The latter comprises 120 subjects’ written production in a forum from a subject within the framework of the Master’s Degree in Secondary Education taught totally online at Universidad Internacional de La Rioja (UNIR). The TICOR sub-corpus embraces 246 writing samples, 4.816-word types and 107.042-word tokens written by 155 students. Again, this sub-corpus comprehends two components (ICT composed of spontaneous written texts of 155 students in an online forum of a subject within the framework of the Degree in Early Childhood Education, and TIC, including written samples of 511 participants in a similar online forum as part of another subject within the Degree in Primary School Education). The origin of the used corpus is the participation of the students in a graded online written activity monitored by the teachers of the two English subjects mentioned above.

Table 1. Components of corpus ENTECOR

The actual study uses the second sub-corpus of TICOR (ICT). Similar to all our previously stated corpora, this one is composed of multiple contributions of the subjects in a forum of a compulsory non-linguistic subject (ICT Tools Applied to the Learning of English), in which English is the medium of instruction and assessment. The instructors’ role in the forums is limited to monitoring and observation without any type of intervention. The students were given a topic for discussion based on the content of the subject and they were required to use English as their only medium of communication.