TEACHING ENGLISH EPISTEMIC MODALS

Communication skills constitute an indispensable part of a language learner's competence. The modern methodology of teaching foreign languages is based upon communicative approach which is a natural consequence of realization of the fact that true communication skills can only be mastered in real communication. This natural realization brings about the following questions. This means that the previous forms of working with linguistic material have to be reconsidered - to enable students to practise linguistic means in real communication students must be provided with the knowledge of typical communicative situations (contexts) of using language units. English epistemic modals are crucially important elements of language competence. They are frequent in speech, constituting a modal frame of supposition, inference, degree of certainty that the speaker attaches to the utterance. The analysis of grammar manuals and textbooks leads to the conclusion that these markers of subjective modality are mostly presented with a brief outline of their generalized lexico-grammatical meaning accompanied by a number of utterance illustrations. Lexicographic sources deal with enumeration of the lexical meanings of the modal with corresponding sentence illustrations. It is obvious from the standpoint of a communicative approach to teaching the second language that this information is not sufficient for a language learner who wants to sound natural in various types of communicative situations since it does not orient the learner in terms of what communicative context a modal is most natural in. The actual study aims to present the concept of mastering English epistemic modals in the frames of communicative approach focusing on the typical communicative situations in which the modal markers express epistemic semantics.