Modality in Official Letters based on a Medical English Learner Corpus
Abstract
Learner corpora are systematic, electronic collections of texts produced by second language learners of a language, which may play an important role in second language acquisition. This study undertakes to investigate modality in the UPMS Learner Corpus of Official Letters. The corpus contains official letters written by students learning medical English at level B2. The data were examined with the help of the Sketch Engine software. The results show that students mainly use modal auxiliaries to express modality. The most commonly used modal auxiliary was ‘would’ with 157 occurrences, mainly in the structures ‘I would like to’ and ‘I would be grateful if you could’. The second most frequent modal auxiliary in the corpus was ‘could’, and other commonly occurring modal auxiliaries include ‘will’ to express future, ‘can’ to express possibility and ‘have to’ to express necessity. Based on the results, it can be concluded that students most commonly express modality with memorized phrases including a modal auxiliary at level B2. However, they have acquired and use these expressions correctly. They pay less attention to other modal devices, such as modal adverbs, adjectives or ‘hedging’.
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