A Corpus-based Study Of College English Learners' Use Of Will And Shall In China

Modal verb plays an important part in English since modal verb is comparatively more frequently used as a whole than full verb. However, modal verb remains to be a problematic area in English grammar due to the discrepancies lying in the description of its meanings and even its grammatical categories. Meanwhile, owing to multiplication and overlapping in the meaning of modal verb, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners appear to have a lot of difficulties in mastering modal verbs. Will as the most frequently used modal verb in English is especially the case, which possesses over ten meanings and some of them turn out similar to those possessed by Shall. College English learners in China seem to hardly use some frequently used meanings of will by native speakers and apply an oversimplified rule to discriminate will from shall, which may imply their unfamiliarity with some important meanings and usage rules of will and shall. With this in mind, the present research is conducted to investigate college English learners'use of will and shall in China on the basis of corpus, aiming to find college English learners'weaknesses in this aspect. In this thesis, the frequently used meanings of will and shall and their usage rules are firstly summarized on the basis of a native speakers'corpus and some views of functional grammar. Subsequently, a comparison in the use of will and shall between a native speakers'corpus and a college English learners'corpus is made to identify their differences and the weaknesses of college English learners in this aspect. It is found that college English learners are ignorant of some important meanings of will and apply an oversimplified discrimination rule between will and shall. In addition, college English learners appear to overuse shall because they use it in a much less restricted way than native speakers. The results prove that it is highly necessary to give more notice to the modal verbs like will and shall in college English teaching and optimize college English learners'way of learning English words.