Abstract:
This study is about investigating and stating the major difficulties that a foreign language
student may face in differentiating the passive, more specifically the agentless passive, and
the stative constructions, passive-like constructions, in an EST discourse. So it is
hypothesized that the students will detect the two mentioned forms if they are aware of the
occurrence of both forms in an EST discourse and their relation to the rhetorical functions.
One experiment has been conducted in order to test the above hypothesis. The experiment is a
test directed to a sample of thirty one first year Master students of English selected by simple
random sampling from a population of about (180) in the English department. The students
were asked to analyse a text taking into consideration the occurrence of the two forms
mentioned above in relation to the rhetorical function of a given sentence. Moreover, they
were asked to answer a set of questions which aim at knowing the students′ attitudes towards
the different modules they have, more specifically their preferences and attendances to EST
theory and practice courses and grammar courses, besides to their awareness (knowledge and
noticing) of the tow forms. The results obtained show that the majority of the students may
face problems in differentiating the two forms because of either their unawareness or
inappropriate interpretation of the meaning expressed in a given sentence, or not paying full
attention.
