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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 The Background of the Study
Language has been an important tool for us to describe our understanding under theobjective world and to develop interpersonal relationships. For foreign language learners, itis important to make their own expression closer to native speakers. Whether communicationis successful or not, it has absolute relations with its own language output and emotionalexpression. So the modal expression is vitally important. It is universally acknowledged thatmodality is an important concept of grammar in the English learning, and also it's a difficultlanguage point to leam. How to correctly and properly use words showing modality areperplex the Chinese English learners for a long time. Nevertheless, different English learnershave different ideas on the use of modal words, especially modal verbs. Throughcomparative analysis of differences of the use of modal words in two or more comparablecorpora, previous researchers found that native speakers tend to use the series of expressionwhen expressing some modal concepts while learners are relying too much on one or twomodal forms, such as can, must, will etc. This phenomenon has aroused the author's greatinterest. Considering the second language learners as the research object to further studycorpus and modal theory, the author chooses this topic for this thesis that is “A Corpus-BasedStudy on Modality in English Argumentative essays by Chinese English Learners".In the second language teaching and learning, there are a lot of domains, but theimportant constituent part is modality research. Scholars reach an agreement that modalityresearch is an important constituent part in the field of second language teaching andlearning. Some empirical research shows that modal verbs are usually used in the students'writing and oral communication.
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1.2 Significance of the Research
This present thesis adopts the modality framework of Palmer. Broadly speaking, thesignificance of this study is in a few aspects: firstly，the argumentative composition is a veryimportant writing genre not only in daily life but also in written English in CET and TEM forChinese college students. It is very important for language teaching to explore the differenceof modal verbs between native speakers and second language learners. We should strengthenthe consciousness of learners of English modal verbs properly.On the other hand, the studies on the modal words in written English have been a hottopic for many years. In written English studies, the focus is mainly the theory-driven studyof the modal verbs in the past. In the study, the corpus approach was adopted to investigatethe conditions in which modal verbs are used. Also the quantitative methods and thequalitative methods were combined in order to find differences and deviations betweenChinese English learners and native speakers in written English. By this way, it tries to raiseawareness of Chinese English learners to improve the levels of both native-like fluency andnative-like selection in written English. Besides some suggestions and implications areprovided to English teachers in order to make up for some deficiencies of the modal verbs inthe teaching thus to strengthen the teaching of modal verbs.In modem world, corpus linguistics is not only a young discipline but also is across-disciplinar本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。