A Contrastive Study of Learner English and NS English.docVIP

Modal Auxiliaries in Phraseology A Contrastive Study of Learner English and NS English Xiaotian Guo The Department of English The University of Birmingham xiaotiang@ 1. Introduction Individual modal verbs in Chinese-speaking learner English have been studied before (for example Liu 2003 and Chang 2001). In a corpus-based contrastive study of modal verbs by Liu, it is found that learners overuse some modal verbs over others. This is useful for learner English researchers, language teachers and students themselves to construct a map of non-native speakers (NNS) performance in the area of indiv