| Researchers find that nonnative speakers of English have different problems in using root modal verbs, MUST, HAVE TO, SHOULD, OUGHT TO and NEED TO, to express obligation and necessity in appropriate contexts. Some find these modals have some kind of underlying meanings and contextual implications (cook, 1978), which is difficult for language learners. What is more, Hinkle doubts that there is a certain relationship between the usage of these modal verbs and the first language culture of speakers; therefore, he conducts a research by comparing the texts of native speakers and those who use English as a second language with a higher language proficiency level. The results of this study indicate that the usage of the root modals must, have to, should, ought to, and need to in NS and NNS writing appears to be culture and context dependent (Hinkle, 1995). That is to say, the usage of these modal verbs is specific to the learner's first language environment; meanwhile, the language proficiency level and exposure to the foreign language do not play an important role during the communicative process. Therefore, a hypothesis may be obtained that, with Chinese as their common native language, Chinese English learners at different English proficiency levels do not vary significantly in their ability of using modal verbs to express root meanings of obligation and necessity.To verify the hypothesis, a writing test was held in The English Education Department of The Capital Normal University on October the 27th, 2005. 384 students from freshman to senior students took part in the test simultaneously. All the students were asked to have an important writing assessment rather than an educational research to guarantee the results. These essays were compared and analyzed qualitatively and quantitively. The 385 essays afterwards were typed into computer to form a small corpus about 135,000 words by using software called WordPilot, then the frequency of each modal verb was counted by the way of concordancing to observe the differences among the five modal verbs and different proficiency levels. Furthermore, other results, including mean and deviation, were also computed and analyzed by T-test by software SPSS. As for the quality data, the texts also were studied to get some information that how the usage of these five modal verbs was influenced by Chinese culture. Such modal verbs as can, may, might, shall were also counted and analyzed in the same way to study other problems of stylistics and tone. The results of the study indicate that these college students of all proficiency levels are inclined to overuse such root modal verbs must, have to, should without significant differences to express obligation and necessity due to Chinese culture that attached great importance to social and family responsibility, loyalty, the supreme of education and so on. And their essays tended to be impolite and offensive.Modal verbs are an important tool to realize pragmatic and semantic function in communication, as a result, the lack of appropriate usage of modal verbs will cause people to feel uncomfortable and awkward inevitably, especially to native speakers. Therefore, both teachers need to raise their awareness as well as students themselves to use modal verbs to perfect their communicative skills. |
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