Abstract
While more Chinese students are going abroad to persue their further academic study, how to help them improve academic writing competence has received wide attention. Modality, as one of the complex areas of English grammar, reflects the writer’s attitude and is extremely important in academic written discourse. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate how Chinese learners of English use modal verbs. For this purpose, a learner corpus (LC) with Chinese learners’ academic writing has been compiled and compared against a professional corpus (PC) which consists of published research articles. With the help of software Antconc 3.2.4w, the use of nine core modal verbs in both corpora has been explored. Findings indicate that compared with professional writers, Chinese learners tend to use modal verbs more frequently; they also tend to overuse can, will, could and would and underuse may. Based on an analysis of the two corpora, this study proposes possible reasons that account for these differences. This study provides some insights into the use of modal verbs by Chinese learners of English and thus informs teaching of modal verbs in the English classroom and contributes to the academic writing curricula design.
Highlights
Modality is extremely important in academic written discourse as it conveys the writer’s attitude both to the propositions he/she makes and to the readers
Based on an analysis of the two corpora, this study proposes possible reasons that account for these differences
Unlike most research on learner corpora in which non-native speaker corpora are compared with native speaker corpora, this study sets out to compare the use of modal verbs in academic writing produced by Chinese learners of English and professional writers
Summary
Modality is extremely important in academic written discourse as it conveys the writer’s attitude both to the propositions he/she makes and to the readers It is only with the successful handling of modality can research findings be expressed accurately. Past research has shown that learners of English seem to have difficulty in using modal verbs appropriately and that they frequently overuse or under-represent certain modal meanings or forms (Hinkel, 1995; DeCarrico, 1986). This leads to the need for an examination of modal verbs and their use by non-native speakers in the specific genre of research articles. It is hoped that the discussion of the use of modal verbs and patterns by learner writers which the learner corpus approach makes possible could give an understanding of non-native speaker use of modal verbs in this genre, contribute to the academic writing curricula design and help improve L2 learners’ academic writing competence
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