Fine-tuning discourse in Thai EFL academic and electronic bulleting board writing
Montri Tangpijaikul
Linguistics, Macquarie University
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Last modified: August 30, 2007

Abstract

A basic repertoire of modality and intensity in English is important in helping learners fine-tune their meaning appropriately, but these linguistics features are generally underused by EFL learners. This study hypothesizes that Thai learners tend to use modals and intensifiers more in the online bulletin board than in student academic essays. Two parallel learners’ corpora, a total of 115,980 words, are used to compare between their writing outputs in the electronic bulletin board and student essays. A framework has been developed based on the existing concepts of modality and degree of intensity. It attempts to capture the four semantic areas including hedging, boosting, committal, and inclination. The analysis includes modal auxiliaries (e.g. will, may), epistemic stance adverbs (e.g. maybe, probably), adjectives (e.g. certain, possible), copular verbs other than ‘be’ (e.g. tend, seem), and intensifiers (e.g. rather, somewhat, totally). The findings show that Thai EFL learners are able to fine-tune their expression with subtlety using these lexical and grammatical devices more in the online than the offline writing.