1 English modal verbs: a comparison of their uses by English native speakers and German students of English Introduction The concept of modality is shared worldwide and it can also be considered a voyage into the human mind. In fact, people reflect about what is probable, necessary or what they are obliged to do and their lives are always affected by these notions. A great number of scholars have long dealt with the question “what is modality?” and even today modality is regarded as an interesting linguistic topic. According to their various ideas and theories, linguists have different approaches. For instance, it is mainly possible to distinguish between epistemic and deontic modality and other categories such as dynamic or evidential modality are a matter of discussion as well. This paper firstly aims to compare the English and German modal systems and modal verbs, which have some common features, whereas others are totally different. It is particularly worth comparing these two languages in order to really understand how they work within the topic of modality. In addition to this, modal verbs can be considered as a means to express modality. They also have shared and proper characteristics and, for instance, they can carry the same significance but they totally differ in form. Anyhow, the main aim of this paper is that of analysing, understanding and comparing how English modal verbs are used by English native speakers and foreign speakers, in particular German students, in Academic Writing. For this purpose, corpora have been a great help. The analysis proper is based on the data coming from the BAWE (British Academic Written English) corpus – regarding English native speakers – and the ICLE (International Corpus of Learner English) corpus – of German students of English. A quantitative analysis was carried out followed by a qualitative one, in order to observe how modal verbs – in particular may, might, must, ought to, shall and should – are used by native speakers and non. The claim put forward is that foreign students have a different approach to modal verbs, maybe influenced by their mother tongue.