A Corpus-Based Study On Chinese EFL Learners' Use Of Modal Auxiliaries Can, Could, May And Might In Their Oral Production

This thesis reports a study that investigated the Chinese tertiary learners'use of the four possibility modals"can, could, may and might"in their oral production. The purpose of the study is to locate the difficulty for Chinese EFL learners to associate the right modal forms with the right meanings and to shed light on the common problems behind Chinese EFL learners'acquisition of the modal auxiliaries.The major method employed in this study falls in the realm of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA). The data were selected from the monologues in the Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SECCL) and the spontaneous speech in the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB). The research design is quantitative by nature supplemented by a close analysis of some individual cases. The statistical calculation and analysis yielded the following findings:Firstly, Chinese learners'use of the four possibility modals significantly deviates from Native speakers'norms. Chinese EFL learners tend to use more tokens of modal can and could and less tokens of may and might than native speakers of English to express"possibility".The semantic distribution of can and could tend to be imbalanced in"epistemic","deontic"and"dynamic"senses. Chinese learners have trouble associating the right modal with the right meaning, which is consistent in some way with Cook's finding. To be specific, Of the three modal senses for both can and could, Chinese learners tend to take"dynamic"sense as their first choice, and"ability"sense in particular, and more or less to ignore"epistemic"sense, but"deontic"sense is most likely to be over-emphasized, which may be due to NNS culturally bound understandings of the nature of permission and the adherence to socio-cultural norms and codes fundamental to L1 cultures, as mentioned by Hinkel.With respect to may and might, Chinese learners are found to use them exclusively to express"epistemic possibility,"brushing aside the"deontic"and"existential"sense of may. To ask for permission, they may rely more on can and could than the use of may. And statistics showed that the adverbial equivalence maybe in the learners'corpus significantly exceeds that in native speakers'corpus. This may result from mother tongue transfer in the sense that maybe is the literal translation of"epistemic"keneng and yexu in Chinese.Secondly, the inappropriate usage of can and could is mainly represented by misuse of tense. L2 Learners may have the false assumption that they may use can and could interchangeably without the knowledge that, unlike"dynamic"can,"epistemic"and"deontic"can is never used with the past tense.Finally, high-achievers perform significantly better than low-achievers in understanding and use of different senses of can and could, suggesting that the use of can and could may be taken as one of the indicators to the learners'linguistic proficiency. The significant difference also expresses itself in the misuse of can between high- and low-achievers and the latter were more likely to misuse can, which partially confirms the claim made earlier. Interestingly, low-achievers performed better than high-achieves in use of could, for which the possible explanation is related to the misuse of tense. The occurrence of may and might is too small to draw any meaningful conclusion. However, the less use of may and might may be attributed to the over reliance on the use of can and could to express"possibility".The pedagogical implications generated from the findings are at least two fold: 1) The difficulty of the four possibility modals lies not in the meanings, but in how to associate the right modal with the right meaning. This study can do much to bring learning of modals into accordance with actual language use, and more attention should be paid to the more commonly chosen senses by native speakers, such as the later acquired"epistemic"and"hypothetical"sense of can and could, the delineated sub-division of"dynamic"can and could, the past tense of can, and the connection between past-tense of can and could and politeness. 2) The discrepancy between NS and NNS use of the four modals can be traced, at least partly, to L1 language transfer and the cultural and educational contexts to NNS students. Practically, the teaching of modals can be made more effective if the fundamental notions and values accepted in target language related culture are explicitly elaborated and the differences in how NS and NNS understand and use the modal senses in their respective cultures are highlighted.