The difficulty in detecting passive and stative forms in EST discourse

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.