abstracttask-based language teaching is considered an effective way to achieve a harmony between grammar and communication. the present study investigates two different ways of teaching modal verbs: task-based versus traditional approaches. to this purpose, an oxford placement test was administered to select 40 homogeneous participants out of a larger population who took this test. the selected...

Abstract Task-based language teaching is considered an effective way to achieve a harmony between grammar and communication. The present study investigates two different ways of teaching modal verbs: task-based versus traditional approaches. To this purpose, an Oxford Placement Test was administered to select 40 homogeneous participants out of a larger population who took this test. The selecte...

Abstract Task-based language teaching is considered an effective way to achieve a harmony between grammar and communication. The present study investigates two different ways of teaching modal verbs: task-based versus traditional approaches. To this purpose, an Oxford Placement Test was administered to select 40 homogeneous participants out of a larger population who took this test. The selecte...

Modal verbs in English are challenging to learn by speakers of other languages. The purpose of thiswas to shed light on the use of gesture in learning English modal verbs by Persian-speaking children.To achieve this, 60 elementary Iranian learners, studying at some institutes in Karaj took part in thisstudy. The participants were randomly put into one experimental group and one control group. T...

Academic discourse has always been the focus of many linguists, especially those who have been involved with English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and discourse analysis. Persuasion, as part of rhetorical structure of academic writing, is partly achieved by employing modality markers.  Adopting a descriptive design, the present study was carried out to compare the use of modality markers in terms...

Modal verbs have different interpretations depending on their context. Previous approaches to modal sense classification achieve relatively high performance using shallow lexical and syntactic features. In this work we uncover the difficulty of particular modal sense distinctions by eliminating both distributional bias and sparsity of existing small-scale annotated corpora used in prior work. W...

The set of English modal verbs is widely recognised to communicate two broad clusters of meanings: epistemic and root modal meanings. A number of researchers have claimed that root meanings are acquired earlier than epistemic ones; this claim has subsequently been employed in the linguistics literature as an argument for the position that English modal verbs are polysemous (Sweetser 1990). In t...

modal verbs and their different meanings can be investigated on the basis of various theoretical frameworks. in this paper, persian modal verbs are examined and analyzed in terms of degrees and kinds of modality proposed by palmer (1990). our analysis shows that although bǎyad ‘must’ does not entail the proposition, it is used to express three degrees of epistemic modality, two degrees of dynam...

This work investigates the role of semantic clause types and modality in argumentative texts. We annotate argumentative microtexts with Situation Entity (SE) classes and additionately label the segments that contain modal verbs with their modal senses. We analyse both the correlation of SE classes and of modal verbs and senses with components of argument structures (such as premises and conclus...