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The choice and use of modal auxiliaries depends on multiple grammatical factors in the sentential environment. The most frequently occurring auxiliary verbs in the TOEFL 11 corpus were extracted from the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean subset of the corpus, and manually coded with a number of morphological, syntactic and semantic features. The paper presents examples of linguistic features such as modal semantics, the co-occurring verb types, and semantic classes of verb phrase proposed by Vendler, as well as the animacy type of the subject shows similarities or differences among the three groups of language learners. The behavioral profile based analysis of the linguistic features revealed that the modal can show similarities among the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Korean and Japanese learners show a clustering of May and Will, while Chinese learners does not form a group with the Korean and Japanese learners regarding may and will. The paper contributes to expanding our understanding on the choice of modal auxiliaries by the learners of English in the three East-Asian countries.