Epistemic Modality In Chinese ESL Learners' Argumentative Essays

As an essential part of modality, epistemic modality has attracted a considerable amount of research attention. Owing to its unique pragmatic functions of mitigating and strengthening the writer's statement, the appropriate expression of this type of modal meaning is deemed as an important indictor of successful academic writing. However, the use of EDs (epistemic devices) has been proved to be a problematic area for ESL (English as Second Language) learners, since it is rather difficult for them to grasp the form and meaning of these diversified epistemic expressions and use them to modify their statement appropriately.Although many learner corpus-based contrastive studies have already been carried out to explore the non-native features of EDs in ESL learners'written output, most paid more attention to frequency distribution of EDs than on the degree of epistemic commitment and epistemic clusters and few have touched upon the developmental features of EDs across proficiency levels. Besides, they are constantly plagued by such inherent problems as small corpus size and low comparability between learner corpus and native speaker corpus. While studies made by American and European scholars have been diversified and sophisticated, few comprehensive studies have been carried out domestically on the use of EDs in Chinese ESL learners'written output.The present study is mainly a CIA (Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis) study of the use of EDs in argumentative essays written by Chinese college English majors and university students from Britain and the United States. The primary aim of this study is to uncover non-native features in learners'use of EDs in terms of frequency distribution, degree of epistemic commitment and epistemic clusters as against native norms. The performances of Chinese learners of different proficiency levels are also compared to gain a better understanding of the developmental features of their interlanguage. The secondary aim of this study is to explore possible contributing factors for learners'non-native behaviors in this respect and to seek potential pedagogical solutions. To achieve these research objectives, a pair of learner corpus and native speaker corpus with high comparability is compiled on the basis of WECCL (Written English Corpus of Chinese College Learners) and LOCNESS (Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays). The major findings of the present study are as follows:1) Chinese ESL learners'use of EDs in their argumentative essays and that of British and American university students have more differences than similarities in terms of frequency distribution. While both groups utilize a largely similar number of EDs, they exhibit distinctive preferences as to frequently used items and devices of different grammatical categories. Chinese learners heavily depend on a narrower range of devices in conveying epistemic meanings, especially certain familiar modal auxiliaries, adverbs and verbs. They also have considerable problems in using particular EDs sufficiently and idiomatically in context.2) Chinese ESL learners tend to make more strong commitment for their statements than native students do and they rely on a few familiar devices to express each degree of commitment.3) Chinese ESL learners'use of epistemic clusters is both scant and unidiomatic. They have difficulty in grasping the forming patterns of native-like epistemic clusters, such as the modal-adverb combinations, thus constantly failing to combine different EDs freely and appropriately in their essays.4) Chinese college English majors in Grade One, Grade Two and Grade Three exhibit largely the same characters as they are viewed as a whole in terms of ED use in their essays. As the proficiency level grows, Chinese learners'overuse of EDs gets severer, their use of certainty markers becomes more frequent, but the pattern of their preferred grammatical categories of EDs turns more native-like.5) The observed non-native features in the use of EDs in Chinese ESL learners'essays are probably the result of inadequate vocabulary instructions, scant pedagogical attention to EDs and learners'implementation of certain strategies such as avoidance and overcompensation.On the basis of these findings, pedagogical suggestions concerning the improvement of vocabulary teaching methods and the inclusion of explicit and appropriate instructions of EDs into the writing courses are made.