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.

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.