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Viana, Vander 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3079-4393
(2009)
Verbos modais na escrita de universitários de língua inglesa:Uma perspectiva de corpus.
In:
Linguagem, criatividade e ensino.
Publit, Rio de Janeiro, pp. 49-77.
ISBN 8577732096
Abstract
Although modals have been central to language analysis, very few studies have focused on the written production of Brazilian advanced EFL students by means of corpus analysis. The present study contrasts the use of modal verbs in the writing of Brazilian EFL undergraduates and that of American and British university students whose first language is English. As far as the data is concerned, two corpora are probed with the help of a computer tool. The research corpus consists of a sample of the Brazilian Portuguese Sub-corpus of the International Corpus of Learner English (Br-ICLE), while the reference corpus corresponds to a section of the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS). Following a statistical approach to data treatment, the study focuses on the frequency of central modal verbs (Biber et al., 1999), namely, 'can', 'could', 'may', 'might', 'must', 'shall', 'should', 'will' and 'would'. The results indicate that Brazilian EFL undergraduates use significantly fewer modal verbs than their American and British counterparts. It is then argued that this reduced frequency of modals in Brazilian writing may make it sound more direct and assertive when compared to that of speakers of English as a first language. From a general perspective, the present study may contribute to a reassessment of English teaching in the Brazilian setting.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | modal verbs,english language,argumentative writing,university education,english as a foreign language,corpus linguistics |
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Education and Lifelong Learning |
| Depositing User: | LivePure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 16 Sep 2019 12:30 |
| Last Modified: | 24 Sep 2024 08:13 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/72235 |
| DOI: |
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