Textbooks: A corpus-driven approach to modal auxiliaries and their didactics

The paper presents an example of the indirect use of corpora in language pedagogy. It centres on a comparative analysis of modal auxiliaries, their distribution, meanings, and contexts, in spoken British English corpus data and in selected texts from EFL textbooks. A focus lies on the differences observed between authentic English as used in natural communicative situations and the kind of synthetic English that pupils are often confronted with in the classroom. It is argued that, if taken seriously, corpus evidence can contribute to an improvement of teaching materials and that it is essential, especially in pedagogical contexts, to pay more attention to frequent phenomena and typical patterns of used language.