Teaching Modality: A Corpus Analysis of the Use of must by University Spanish Learners of English

Abstract

Corpus- based studies have brought interesting empirical results to the field of foreign language teaching at its different levels, including higher education. The main objective of these studies is to improve the teaching methodology by identifying students’ errors and presenting methods that can adapt to their needs. This research flows in the same stream through detecting the errors that our Spanish learners make in their use of the modal verb must. It studies a corpus that includes 246 writing samples, 4.816- word types and 107.042- word tokens produced by 155 students in an online forum of a subject within the framework of the Degree in Early Childhood Education. The free concordance software program AntConc was used to detect errors in the use of the modal verb must by our students. This monolingual corpus is compiled from the participation of students in the compulsory subjects that use English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI). The results of this study show four types of errors: the use of infinitive with to after must, putting two modal verbs consecutively, the incorrect use of must in interrogative forms and the incorrect use of must in passive voice. The analysis of these errors in context draws from error analysis in second language (Ellis 1990) to distinguish between native language interference, overgeneralization and target language rule ignorance.