A Survey Of Junior School Students' Use Of English Modal Verbs

As high-frequency words and significant ways to express modalities,the ues of English Modal Verbs is crucial to English learners.However,it's not easy to use them very well for primary English learners.Primary English learners will confront some problems in the process of using English Modal Verbs.As for the study to English learners' use of English Modal Verbs,domestic and overseas scholars pay more attention to the influence factors and the orders of using English Modal Verbs.The students' existing problems in using English Modal Verbs are seldom discussed.It is necessary to survey primary English learners' acquisition of English Modal Verbs.The 9 Modal Verbs which are widely used at the stage of junior middle school will be mainly discussed in this thesis.And on the basis of the previous studies,the students' compositions of English mid-term exam,which are finished by 400 randomly chosen students in grade 2 and grade 3 of Zhangzhou No.2 Middle School and Zhangzhou No.3 Middle School,will be taken as the objects.These compositions will be collected and then be used to build a corpus.AntConc3.2.1w and interviews will be employed to get the situation of junior school students' acquisition of English Modal Verbs.The study aims to explore the following questions: 1.What is the general situation of junior school students' use of English Modal Verbs? 2.What is the specific situation of junior school students' use of English Modal Verbs? 3.What are the junior school students' existing problems and the problems' distribution types in using English Modal Verbs?It is shown that the general situation of junior school students' use of English Modal Verbs is not very good.There are significant differences between English native speakers and the junior school students in using English Modal Verbs.The general frequency of utilization of English Modal Verbs is relatively high in junior school students' compositions.As for the 9 core English Modal Verbs,the students have overused some of them,but others are seldom used.CAN?SHALL?SHOULD and MUST are overused,but COULD?WILL?WOULD?MAY and MIGHT are rarely appeared in their compositions.This result is roughly identical to the previous study.Meanwhile,employing monotonous subject,relying on certain sentence patterns,using incorrect semantic collocation and simplex semantic meaning are the main problems in the compositions.The majority of students fail to realize the importance of English Modal Verbs.They learn English Modal Verbs with rote memorization of teaching materials.According to the results,this research recognizes that although the junior school students prefer to employing English Model Verbs to express modalities,the students' aquisition level is still low.Even though some English Model Verbs are used in high frequency,some serious problems still exist in the students' compositions.What's more,English Model Verbs receive less attention in the students' English learning process.On account of author's limited ability and time,it will be necessary for future researchers to survey the junior school students' use of English Modal Verbs with broader-based objects.The author suggests that teachers ought to pay more attention to English Modal Verbs teaching,cultivate students' thinking ability of English and strengthen students' writing ability of exercises.