MODALITY IN DISCOURSE ON EDUCATION FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: AN ANALYSIS OF RESEARCH ARTICLE ABSTRACTS

Abstract

Research article abstracts (RAAs) are argued to form a genre in their own right, which is characterised by a number of genre-specific features, such as the discursive manifestation of modality. Whereas there is a solid body of research on modality in RAAs in, for instance, hard disciplines, currently, however, scientific enquiry into modality in RAAs in discourse on education for sustainable development (ESD) seems to be underrepresented in the literature. In this light, the article presents a study that seeks to explore modality in a corpus of English-medium RAAs on ESD. The corpus was comprised of 200 RAAs published by Journal of Teacher Education for Sustainability (JTES), one of the leading ESD-themed journals. The corpus was analysed quantitatively in order to identify and quantify the so-called central modals in English, namely can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, and would. The corpus analysis was facilitated by the computer software program AntConc (Anthony 2022), which calculated the total number of the aforementioned central modal verbs per issue. Thereafter, SPSS (IBM 2011) was used in order to compute means and standard deviations of the central modals in the corpus. The results of the investigation indicated that can and should are the most frequent central modals in the corpus. Furthermore, the findings were discussed through the lens of the theoretical approach to modality formulated by Palmer (1990), who proposed the following types of modality: (i) deontic, (ii) dynamic, and (iii) epistemic. It was established that can was associated, predominantly, with dynamic modality, whereas should was related to epistemic modality. The findings are suggestive of a number of linguo-didactic implications that could be of use to academic writers, who publish research articles in ESD-themed journals. It could be suggested to employ should in order to create the image of a careful, considerate, and non-assertive academic author, whose tonality is characterised by hedging. Additionally, it could be advised to use can as a dynamic modal in order to present and describe concrete action-oriented responses to the implementation of ESD-related practices. Hopefully, these suggestions would be of help to novice and post-graduate academic writers in their preparation of an effective and publishable RAA in the field of ESD.