Proceedings of The 6th International Academic Conference on Education
Year: 2023
DOI:
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A Corpus-Based Analysis Of Would in L2 Writings: A Comparison between Asian EFL Learners and L1English Speakers
Shie Sato
ABSTRACT:
This paper examines the modal verb would in written essays produced by 200 L1 English speakers and 1,200 EFL learners in China, Japan, and Thailand. Previous studies on the modal verbs in general (e.g., can, could, may, might, will, would) offer ample evidence as to varied uses of these modals by L2 learners, suggesting that the modal verbs are extremely difficult to master for non-native speakers of English. By investigating a total of 2,800 essays obtained from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (Ishikawa, 2013), the present study investigates the use of would—the modal verb found to be much less frequent compared with the other modals—with the aim of identifying the areas requiring pedagogical attention specific to each L2 group. The corpus-based analyses of the differences between L1 and L2 writings suggest that L1 English speakers and EFL learners exhibit rather different collocational patterns and sentence configurations. The results indicate a strong preference among the EFL learners for the formulaic pattern of would like to express politeness and conditional sentences involving if-clauses.
keywords: would, modal verbs, L2 English writing, epistemic marker, corpus-linguistics