The English language is widespread enough in the word to make learning this language useful in Hungary. More and more people use this language to communicate. For that reason teaching English in Hungary gets an important place in education. In order to make teaching English more efficient, several teaching methods should be investigated. In this thesis one language area was selected to be discussed further. That area is the group of modal auxiliaries. The aims of this thesis are the following: to define what the common formal and semantic characteristics of modal auxiliaries are, what kinds of methods are suggested teaching this group, and finally, how grammar and coursebooks present them. In order to see the difference between the basic modal auxiliaries and other language elements, MUST as a modal auxiliary and HAVE TO will be compared.