Identification of Modality in Thesis Writing: A Systemic Functional Linguistics Perspective

Abstract

Modality refers to the speaker's judgment. It seeks a listener's judgment on the status of what is being stated. This study was set out to examine the prevalence and functions of modality in the research writing of MPhil scholars of Government College University Faisalabad (GCUF). For this purpose, the data were collected in the form of six theses belonging to MPhil scholars of GCUF, and all of them were from the Department of Applied Linguistics. The design of this study was a mixed-method. UAM corpus tool was used for the codification of the data. The modal used was the Systemic Functional modal of modality by Halliday (2014). The study revealed that the most frequent type of modality was probability and the frequent value was low in the writing. Besides this, scholars used modality more subjectively and implicitly rather than objectively and explicitly. Furthermore, results showed that the most common functions for which researchers employ modality in the theses were making tentative statements, ignoring direct criticism, and acknowledging the limitations of their research findings. The study's findings assist the teachers and syllabus designers by pointing out the flaws of ESL learners, and they can work and improve the syllabus accordingly.