The purpose of the research is to explore ways of establishing interlanguage models based on a large-scale English essays contributed by non-native speakers. Every language has a system which represents the speaker’s attitude relating to modality such ...
The purpose of the research is to explore ways of establishing interlanguage models based on a large-scale English essays contributed by non-native speakers. Every language has a system which represents the speaker’s attitude relating to modality such as permission, ability, and obligation within social situations. In English, these kinds of attitudinal meanings are primarily expressed by modal verbs. Since modal auxiliary is one of the important verbal categories in English, this topic has attracted numerous researchers both in L1 and in L2. (Coates & Leech, 1980; Coates, 1983; Palmer, 1990; Mindt, 1995; Jung & Min, 1999; Deshors, 2002; Tagliamonte & D’Arcy, 2007; Collins, 2007, 2009). Much previous research has pointed out the challenges that the modal auxiliaries impose on both theoretical linguistics and language teaching. In theoretical linguistics, it is more than often stated that the difficulty of studying modals lies in the fact that modals display significant regional variation as well as register variation (Biber, Johansson, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999; Coates, 1983, 1995; Collins, 1988, 2007, 2009). From the perspective of language teaching, some studies such as Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman (1999) pointed out that acquiring modals was one of the most difficult aspects of L2 learning because of their idiosyncratic nature. Although it is important to investigate the distribution and use of modal auxiliaries in native speakers (NSs), it is also important to study those of non-native speakers (NNSs), since the use of modals in EFL learners’ discourse contexts may be different from that of NSs. The comparison of writing samples of NNSs with those of NSs is important, because a standard variety of English plays a central role in ESL and EFL teaching (Strevens, 1981) and it serves as a common reference point for comparison with the other varieties of English (Crystal, 2003). This study investigates the distributions of modals in 11 EFL learners’ writings and examines how the distributions change depending on the following two factors: (i) L1 of the test takers and (ii) score levels. The TOEFLL11 corpus is explored, which was recently released and contained the writing samples of 11 L1s. We classified the writings by the above two criteria and examined how these factors influenced the distribution of modals, and the meaning distribution of the most frequently occurring modal can. Through the investigation, we found (i) that the EFL learners preferred to use modals in the order of can, will, and would; and (ii) that the frequency of can decreased but that of will and would increased as score level went up. The meaning distributions were observed by dividing the meaning of can into three categories (ability, possibility, and permission). We found that (i) ability was the most prevalent meaning in the EFL learners’ writings and that (ii) the possibility meaning increased as the test score level went up. The analyses of the distribution of the modals from 12,100 essay samples contributed by TOEFL test takers by 11 different language backgrounds have enhanced our understanding of what modal auxiliary may serve as a default modal with regard to the distribution and meaning, and what efffect the score level (as an indirect indicator of proficiency level) may bring about with regard to the form and meaning distribution of the modals.