چکیده:
Many elements contribute to the relative difficulty in acquiring specific aspects of English as a foreign language (Goldschneider & DeKeyser, 2001). Modal auxiliary verbs (e.g. could, might), are examples of a structure that is difficult for many learners. Not only are they particularly complex semantically, but especially in the Malaysian context reported on in this paper, there is no direct equivalent in the students’ L1. In other words, they are a good example of a structure for which successful acquisition depends very much on the quality of the input and instruction students receive. This paper reports on analysis of a 230,000 word corpus of Malaysian English textbooks, in which it was found that the relative frequency of the modals did not match that found in native speaker corpora such as the BNC. We compared the textbook corpus with a learner corpus of Malaysian form 4 learners and found no direct relationship between frequency of presentation of target forms in the textbooks and their use by students in their writing. We also found a very large percentage of errors in students’ writing. We suggest a number of possible reasons for these findings and discuss the implications for materials developers and teachers.
خلاصه ماشینی:
"The motivation for using a corpus approach in language learning research is related in part to the attraction of being able to offer a description of language in use and also to the fact that previous research on authentic texts have revealed significant inconsistencies between the use of lexical items and grammatical structures in corpora, and those found in traditional language textbooks that are based purely on introspective judgments (Campoy, Belles-Fortuno, & Gea-Valor, 2010).
In this study the population of our pedagogic corpus was sourced from four Malaysian English language textbooks currently used for secondary Malaysian students of Form 1 through Form 4, with a total of just under 230,000 words (Mukundan & Aneleka, 2007) 1 .
The learner corpus we used was sourced from two written essays produced by Form 1 and Form 4 Malaysian students as part of a previous study (Arshad, Mukundan, Kamarudin, Rahman, Rashid, & Edwin 2002).
Among all reference corpora available, the insights on modal auxiliary verbs were sought from BNC because the samples of written and spoken language used for this corpus were designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English (BrE) which is the closest English variety used in Malaysia (Menon, 2009; Mukundan & Roslim, 2009; Mukundan & Khojasteh, 2011).
In order to examine the first research question, content analysis was carried to retrieve absolute frequencies of occurrences for nine core modal auxiliary verb forms from all written and spoken texts in the four Malaysian secondary English language textbooks."