• Laleh Khojasteh

  Author

• Nasrin Shokrpour

  Author

• Mohammad Rafatbakhsh

  Author

Based on prior studies suggesting that ESL Malaysian learners have some difficulties in terms of certain semantic functions of modal auxiliary verbs, this study assumed that there might be some inadequacies in the secondary school Malaysian English textbooks which could have caused these learners to be error-prone to modal
structures. This assumption was based on the mismatch found in corpus studies between the language presented in prescribed textbooks and real language use. Accordingly, five modal auxiliaries under two categories of “obligation/ necessity” as well as “volition/prediction” modals were chosen to be analyzed in this corpus-based study. This study needed to be corpus-based because otherwise a great deal of information that could hardly be envisaged with the naked eye could have gone unnoticed. Therefore, WordSmith Tools 4.0 was used almost entirely for the purpose of investigating the semantic function of modals should, must, will, would and shall in the
280,000 running-word textbook-corpus consisting of five Malaysian textbooks. Apparently, the findings show that these textbooks overemphasize the minor semantic functions not really taking into account the frequent functions of modals used in present-day English. It is also argued that although there are invaluable insights available in terms of modal auxiliary verb forms and their semantic functions in major corpus-based studies, this real-life language has not been well presented in Malaysian English language textbooks. 

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