Modal verbs in English essays written by Czech secondary-school students

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of a frequency analysis of modal verbs and their complementation in 390 English school-leaving essays written by Czech secondary-school students in a high-stakes B1 level exam. These constitute a learner corpus, CZEMATELC 2017. The study reveals a very high proportion of correct complementation patterns, but predominantly with lexical verbs at A1 and A2 CEFR levels. The most frequent errors are the complementation of modal verbs by past-tense forms of lexical verbs and the absence of complementation.