A Contrastive Study Of Modality In English Personal Statements Written By American Students And Chinese Students

In recent years, with the development of globalization, there is an increasing number ofChinese students, who are applying for the admission to overseas universities. Personalstatement is one of the most important ways to show oneself and express his/her personalability, which plays a critical role in the university application process. However, due to thewriters’ unfamiliarity of this type of academic writing, lack of writing skills and theknowledge of foreign cultural backgrounds, lots of the writings are unstandard andlow-qualified, resulting in the failure to application. Unfortunately, up till now, little attentionis paid to the personal statement. There has been little study on this kind of genre. Therefore,this study will conduct a comparative analysis of the personal statements written by Americanand Chinese students from the perspective of systemic-functional grammar.30English personal statements written by Chinese students and34by American studentsare collected from books and websites as data. Two corpora are established, the former isChinese corpus and the latter is American corpus. This study takes Halliday’ssystemic-functional grammar as the theoretical framework, and adopts both quantitative andqualitative methods to conduct the contrastive analysis from the following four aspects:Modal Operator, Modal Adjuncts, Expansions of the Predicator and Metaphors of Modality.Moreover, types of modality, values of modality and orientations of modality are alsoexplored. It aims at revealing the similarities and differences in the distribution of each kindof modal expressions in the two corpora, as well as in the usage and choice of the types,values and orientations of modality. It is expected to explain the possible reasons causing thesimilarities and differences and discuss the interpersonal functions realized by modalitysystem.Through the comparative study, similarities as well as differences exist in the usage ofmodality system in the two corpora. The main similarities are as follows:1. modal operatorsand modal adjuncts appear most frequently in the two corpora.2. metaphors of modality areused relatively less, expansions of the predicator are rarely employed.3. in the aspect of typeof modality, the number of the modal expressions realizing modalization is larger than thoseexpressing modulation.4. for the choice of value of modality, both American and Chinese students prefer modal expressions attached with median value.5. as for orientation ofmodality, the frequency of subjective expressions is much higher than that of objectiveexpressions. Due to different cultural values, cultural patterns and cultural orientations of thetwo counties, many differences are found as following:1. the Chinese students are apt to usemore modal expressions that express probability than the American students. However, themodal expressions expressing inclination and obligation appear more frequently in Americancorpus.2. the American students use the high-value modal expressions more frequently thanthe Chinese students.3. the Chinese students tend to use more objective expressions, whilethe American students seldom use such kind of expressions.This paper not only integrates the theory related to modality system and practicalapplication reasonably, but also extends the scope of the application of the theory. It alsodeepens the understanding of the realization devices of modality and their functions inpersonal statements. Besides, this study may turn into the guidance towards the writing andteaching of personal statements.