Cross-linguistic Distribution of English Modals in TOEFL Essay Writings

The study investigates the distributions of modals in 11 EFL learners’ writings and examines how the distributions change depending on the following three factors: (i) L1 of the test takers, (ii) language family, and (iii) score levels. The TOEFL11 corpus is explored, which was relatively recently released and contained the writing samples of 11 L1s. We classified the writings by the above three criteria and examined how these factors influenced the distribution of modals. The results revealed (i) that the EFL learners preferred to use modals in the order of can, will, and would, and (ii) that the frequency of can decreased but that of will and would increased as score level went up. We examined the modal can more closely, since can was the most frequently used modal in the EFL learners’ writings. We divided its meaning into three categories (ability, possibility, and permission) and examined the meaning distributions. We found that (i) ability was the most prevalent meaning in the EFL learners’ writings and that (ii) the possibility meaning increased as the level went up.