An Empirical Study On The Application Of Dynamic Context To English Modal Verbs Teaching

As an important component of vocabulary, the English modal verb is of critical importance to the EFL learners. Researchers have accumulated a great deal of evidence that the traditional English modal verb teaching is emphasized on grammatical rules, which ignores the utilization of context. This results in the fact that students'recognition of communicative function of language is not enough. However, with modal verbs teaching in China develops from the traditional methods to multi-methods, the utilization of context in modal verbs learning has been greatly noticed, there are a few experimental studies on this topic. And most ways of applying context into modal verbs teaching is mainly just to let the students learn the meaning of modal verbs in the already existed text. As the text in the textbook only provides a static context which is quite different from the reality, it is not enough for the students to realize that the language is ever-changing in the process of communication and to well apply the newly-learned modal verbs into their daily life. The students'pragmatic competence of modal verbs will not be enhanced greatly.That is why the author introduces an adaptation theory of the dynamic context theory, and tries to apply it into modal verbs teaching. Verschueren (1999) believes that contexts are generated in language usage and keep changing with communication. It is not only a static construction, but also a dynamic adjustment. On the basis of this theory, the author believes that the teacher should teach the modal verbs in a dynamic language context and encourage students to get rid of the constraints of the static context, and use the learned modal verbs to make meaningful sentences and dialogues.In this thesis, an experiment study is conducted by the author focusing on the applicability of the method of constructing dynamic context to modal verbs teaching and learning. Different teaching procedures are adopted in the two classes of junior college students from Grade One to inspect which procedure is more effective in helping the students acquire pragmatic modal verbs competence. From the results analysis it is easy to see that the students in experimental group have made much more progress after the experiment than those in control group, which definitely proves the hypothesis:"the new teaching method—teaching and learning modal verbs in a dynamic communicative context is more effective in helping students understand the communicative function of modal verbs and developing the pragmatic competence of them to carry out language communication with learned modal verbs."On the basis of this, some pedagogical implications for modal verbs teaching in classroom are provided.