| Summary: | This paper aims to investigate how international postgraduate students use modals as
hedges in academic writing in comparison with native writers and what factors may
affect their use of those modals. For these purposes, native writers’ and non-native
writers’ corpora were compiled by collecting essays from MICUSP and seven
international MA students. In addition, a questionnaire survey was also conducted so
as to collect the international students’ demographic data about their L1, proficiency
and learning experiences. The analysis of the corpora showed that six out of seven
non-native writers overused the possibility modals (i.e. may, might, could and can)
whilst only three of them overused the epistemic possibility modals (may, might and
could) compared with the native writers. Further analysis demonstrated each
participant relied on a particular modal rather than used them in a balanced manner.
In addition, the deeper analysis of instances of ‘can’ indicated the possibility that some
of the participants confused its usage with that of ‘could’. The exploration of the data
obtained from the questionnaire survey showed that the L1 background is likely to
affect the use of possibility modals, especially when the writer’s L1 has the equivalent
words to the possibility modals in English. Furthermore, the learning experience is
also likely to have some impacts on the use of modals in question. In particular, the
discourse-level awareness-raising activity could facilitate non-native writers to use
‘may’. On the other hand, proficiency did not seem to have a strong effect on the use
of possibility modals. In the Conclusion chapter, some pedagogical implications are
suggested regarding teaching the use of modals as hedges.
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