日本人英語学習者コーパスを用いた法助動詞の使用に関する研究
スポンサーリンク
概要
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The purpose of this study is to investigate the characteristics of modal auxiliaries in Japanese EEL learners' written English compared to the characteristics in native English writing. A learners' corpus consisting of essays written in one hour was constructed. 140 subjects who contributed data to the corpus chose one of 11 selected essay titles. They also took the TOEIC test, by which they were grouped into two L2 skill levels. The computer-based quantitative comparison of data revealed that Japanese learners underused the modal auxiliaries would, and could; on the other hand, they overused three modal auxiliaries-can, may, and must. In terms of the meanings of individual modals, the analysis found that could and would with epistemic meanings like 'possibility' and 'prediction' were hardly used in the learners' corpus, but must meaning 'obligation' was overused. This indicates that learners tend to write stronger expressions than they intend and have difficulty expressing the appropriate degree of possibility and likelihood. A detailed analysis of writing skill levels showed that the lower-proficiency group exhibited greater problems in using modal auxiliaries.
- 2011-12-30