Marcin Jaroszek

The article discusses the results of a longitudinal study of how modality, as an aspect of spoken discourse competence of selected thirteen advanced students of English, developed throughout their three-year English as a Foreign Language tertiary education. The study investigated possible factors determining the development of three aspects of modality: (1) epistemic modality, (2) specific modality, that is those modality expressions that are both characteristic of natural English discourse or are underrepresented in L2 discourse, and (3) modality diversity. The analysis was carried out in relation to a number of variables, including two reference levels, one represented in English native discourse and the other observed in teacher talk in actual Practical English classes, language type exposure, as registered by the subjects of the study on a weekly basis.

The article discusses the results of a study of how modality, as an aspect of spoken discourse competence in thirteen selected advanced students of English, was realised when Polish is the mother tongue and English the foreign language. Since the subjects demonstrated high levels of language proficiency, a portrait of an advanced learner of English is described in the first section of the article. Section 2 of the article presents the research questions and data collection procedures. The results of the study are interpreted in Section 3, in which an attempt is made to investigate possible correlations between L1 and L2 modality use with reference to deontic and epistemic modality, in a quantitative and qualitative form.

This article discusses the place of modality as a pragmalinguistic phenomenon in communication and the implications of such an investigation for contrastive discourse analysis. It proposes an alternative three-dimensional model of modality, the construction of which is possible through the addition of the affective load of an utterance as a separate variable related to speech modalisation and the assumption that dynamic modality is, in fact, correlated with deontic modality, at least on a prepositional level. The article also discusses the problems when contrastively analysing modality realisation. It highlights that the large number of cross-cultural nuances found in modal devices reflects the enormity of analytic difficulties with which a researcher is likely to be faced.

This article discusses the role of input in the development of discourse competence with reference to modality use, as well as the role of language transfer, which can in fact cover many aspects L2 communication, for instance, cultural codes or elements of the politeness system, including modality, in L2 learning. It indicates that just exposing the learner to linguistic input may not enable them to fully comprehend the pragmalinguistic intricacies of authentic communication. It also suggests pragmalinguisticly intricate features of communication may fail to be taken in even by the advanced foreign language learner, since they may not meet the relevance requirement of the input provided.