Have the Modal Verb Phrase Structures Been Well Presented in Malaysian English Language Textbooks?

Abstract

To date, many studies focused on the behavior of English grammatical structures in various national and international textbooks and questioned the authenticity of the language and the grammar presented in these textbooks. To see if Malaysian English language textbooks are free from these issues, this study compared the ways in which modal verb phrase structures are presented in these textbooks and real language use. This was addressed in one research question and the design applied was qualitative content corpus analysis. The findings reveal that evidently, there are very great differences in the relative frequency of use of the nine verb phrase structures in which modals can occur in real language and the ones in Malaysian English language textbooks (Form 1-5). The survey result also reveals that secondary learners are not really exposed to other verb structures, particularly structures with passive, progressive and perfect aspects.