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Students’ awareness of the importance of using proper English grammar in the job market: a critical examination of perceptions and practices

Paper · 2026 · Badr Allehyani

Summary

This survey study asks whether university EFL students in Saudi Arabia understand how much correct English grammar matters at work, how their grammar-learning experience affects their sense of being able to use it professionally, and what gets in the way. The author combines two frameworks: Ajzen's Planned Behavior Theory (attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control) and Hymes' Communicative Competence Theory (grammar as one part of using language in social context). A construct-mapping table ties each theoretical construct to questionnaire items. Data came from a structured questionnaire of 27 Likert-scale items given to students at Umm Al-Qura University. Most respondents said proper grammar matters for workplace communication and career progress, and they favored explicit grammar teaching. Their confidence in actually applying grammar was only moderate, and lowest for speaking. This gap between belief and perceived ability is the main finding. The paper recommends workplace-style tasks, rubrics based on employer expectations, and low-stakes practice to build confidence. It is an education study, not an NLP paper, so its value to Mova lies in its framing rather than in any resource.

Key points

  • The study is quantitative and uses a 27-item Likert questionnaire. It was run at a single university (Umm Al-Qura, Saudi Arabia), which the author names as a limit on generalizability.
  • The theory base is Planned Behavior Theory (Ajzen, 1985) together with Communicative Competence Theory (Hymes, 1972). The paper follows Alptekin's four components: linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic competence.
  • Students reported high awareness of grammar's role at work but only moderate confidence in using it, and the weakest confidence was in spoken communication.
  • Respondents expressed strongly positive attitudes toward explicit grammar instruction, even though the Saudi curriculum leans toward fluency-oriented approaches.
  • Recommendations include tasks that simulate workplace scenarios, assessment rubrics informed by employers, no-stake writing, scaffolded speaking, and formative feedback.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The paper builds an explicit table linking each theoretical construct to how it is measured, so every claim can be traced back to specific instruments.
  • I2. It treats "knowing that grammar matters" and "being able to apply it" as separate measured quantities, and the gap between them is the actual finding.
  • I3. It splits communication ability into linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic components, with strategic meaning compensating for one's own limitations.
  • I4. Confidence was reported separately for written and spoken use, and speaking came out weakest. Breaking results down by modality reveals a weakness that one averaged score would hide.
  • I5. The paper cites evidence that grammar errors lower readers' judgments of a writer's competence, which suggests surface correctness carries trust beyond content.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Each evaluation suite could declare which capability (parsing, role assignment, event order) it is meant to probe, so a score is never read as evidence for a skill the test does not measure.
  • I2 (answer): Tests could separate recognizing a rule or fact from using it inside a multi-step answer, so errors are attributed to knowledge gaps versus application gaps.
  • I3 (frames): The pragmatics layer could label phenomena by component, and a "strategic" fallback could explicitly record when Mova works around a failed parse instead of hiding it.
  • I4 (tree): Parser accuracy could be reported separately for conversational or transcribed-speech text and for edited prose, exposing register-specific failures.
  • I5 (back): Generated text could pass a grammaticality check (for example, re-parsing the output into a well-formed UD tree) before release, since fluent errors would undermine trust in correct answers.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Umm al-Qura UniversityMakkah al Mukarramah · Saudi Arabia21 works · 274 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksSocial Sciences · 1,772 worksCommunication · 97 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Badr Allehyani. 2026. Students’ awareness of the importance of using proper English grammar in the job market: a critical examination of perceptions and practices. Frontiers in Education 11.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3389/feduc.2026.1825388

@inproceedings{allehyani2026students,
  title = {{Students’ awareness of the importance of using proper English grammar in the job market: a critical examination of perceptions and practices}},
  author = {Badr Allehyani},
  booktitle = {Frontiers in Education 11},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.3389/feduc.2026.1825388},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1825388}
}

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