The effects of essay topics on modal verb uses in L1 and L2 academic writing

This study analyzes modal verb use in a small corpus of L1 and L2 writing (718 essays/201,601 words) on five topics written by speakers of English, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. The results demonstrate that median frequency rates of modal verbs in L2 essays are significantly affected by the writing topic, depending on the writers’ L1s and the contextual meanings and functions of obligation and necessity modals. On the whole, the frequency rates of possibility and ability modals appear to be less topic-dependent than obligation and necessity modals in the L2 writing of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean speakers. In many cases, writing prompts/topics are generally designed to be accessible to young adults of any cultural and linguistic background. However, broad-based topic accessibility also implies reliance on writers’ personal experiences and socio-cultural background knowledge that can lead to a greater topic-effect on L2 writing and overuse of such language features as obligation and necessity modals. The study concludes that more personally distant topics elicit fewer disparities between L1 and L2 prose than topics in which the student writers are expected to draw on their personal experiences.