MODALS AND MODALITY IN ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

In order to study the frequency of modal occurrences and meanings in scientific and technical English as used at the graduate level in an American university for possible applications in teaching and preparing materials for foreign students studying English for Science and Technology (EST), six hours of classroom lectures (in the fields of computers, civil engineering, and medicine) and a comparable amount of data from reading assignments for these classes were analyzed according to the framework developed by F. R. Palmer in Modality and the English Modals.Possible application of these findings to teaching and preparing materials for EST are discussed.Transcriptions of the classroom lectures are provided in the appendices.The 80,000 word data base yielded about 1550 modals, 1100 spoken and 450 written. About 23 percent of the finite verb phrases in the spoken data contain modals and 16 percent in the written data. The most common spoken modals in these data are can, will, could, going to, and have to. The most common written modals in these data are may, can, should, will, and must. The most common spoken meanings are dynamic (those which indicate that an event is possible or necessary or that the subject has the ability or willingness to do something), futurity, conditionality and unreality, and epistemic (judgments about propositions). The most common written meanings are dynamic, epistemic, instructional, and nonfactivity.