Abstract
Modal verbs, as one of modality devices, play an important role in academic writing and argument. To gain insights into the use of modal verbs in academic writing of Thai EFL students, the in-depth analysis of 15 discussion essays written by the third-year English majors at one public university in Thailand was carried out. It focused specifically on the nine core modal verbs (can, could, may, might, will, would, shall, should and must) and examined their frequencies and semantic functions. The data analysis employed Sketch Engine, a corpus concordance, and drew on categories of semantic functions. The analysis revealed that can, will, may and should were the top four frequently favored items, respectively while must, could, would and might were found to be exceptionally underused. As for semantic functions, the most dominant meaning was “possibility” expressed by can. The results indicate that Thai students’ academic writing skills need to be significantly improved, particularly their ability to use modal verbs strategically in their essays. The curriculum design for academic writing needs to emphasize both syntactic structure and semantic functions of modal verbs and encompass activities urging students to practice using these modals systematically and purposefully.
Highlights
Academic writing skills are vitally important for university students because they need to perform various writing tasks, such as assignments, exam, research reports or theses
Research Methodology The corpus of this study were 15 discussion essays written by 15 third year English and Communication (EC) majors who enrolled in a compulsory course called Academic Writing offered in one public university in Thailand
The results encompass the frequencies of the nine core modal verbs and the semantic functions of each modal
Summary
Academic writing skills are vitally important for university students because they need to perform various writing tasks, such as assignments, exam, research reports or theses. In order to produce successful academic written texts, students need to be able to utilize relevant linguistic resources, one of which is modal auxiliary verbs (modal verbs for short). Their significance is that they are linguistic devices commonly employed to convey modality in English academic discourse (Yang, 2018). 6), modality is “the intermediate choices between yes or no”. Discussion is not about presenting an argument. Rather, it aims to convince the reader of the value of the proposed issue (Knapp & Watkins, 1994). The writer’s competent use of modality is highly valued. Knapp and Callaghan (1989, p. 42) stress that
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