Because graduate students—particularly second language
writers—need to present research findings with the appropriate nuance
and present themselves as responsible members of their discourse
communities, modal verbs merit attention in research writing courses at
the university level. Modal verbs, with functions such as expressing
varying degrees of certainty, play an important role in hedging.
Hedging, in turn, is an essential feature of research writing. In
investigating hedging in scientific research articles, Ken Hyland (1996)
noted that in research writing, an author’s claims and interpretations
of evidence are subject to acceptance or rejection by the discourse
community, and thus must be phrased with an appropriate degree of
certainty. In this article I describe difficulties my students
encountered with modal verbs (specifically, with should and must), what they and I
found when informally investigating the use of should
and must in research articles in their fields of
study, and how an ESL/EFL instructor might structure a unit within an
academic writing course to help students control the use of these modals
in research writing.
COURSE CONTEXT
The course in which these questions arose is “Fundamentals of
Research Writing for Graduate Students,” which typically includes 8 to
12 students in social science fields. Some are later-year doctoral
students who have already published research articles in peer-reviewed
journals. Others are first-year doctoral students with limited
experience conducting original research who are building their skills at
reading, summarizing, synthesizing, and critiquing scholarly research.
The course uses Swales and Feak’s Academic Writing for Graduate
Students (2004). The main assignments are three writing
samples, for which students are encouraged to submit a piece of writing
they are currently working on, such as an article critique for one of
their graduate classes in their field or a methods section for a current
research project. Grammar instruction is limited to about eight lessons
per semester in which we address selected structures that have proven
problematic in students’ writing.
PROBLEMATIC USES OF SHOULD IN STUDENTS’ WRITING
In my students’ writing, I have found modal verb usages such as these:
A. In this scenario no borrowers have funds, so they should borrow funds to run their businesses.
B. Agents can sell equities to the corporation (i.e., firms
repurchase equities from the shareholders). If they does so, they should
pay the individual capital taxes.
The first clause of sentence A seems to say that borrowers
truly need to borrow money to run their businesses, which would mean
that the sentence requires must, not should. Similarly, in B, the context implies that if
someone sells equities, he or she is truly required to pay individual
capital taxes. Here too the sentence would seem to require must.
Students explain their use of should in
these kinds of contexts by saying they have been taught to use should to express obligation, and that “obligation”
seems an appropriate way to characterize contexts such as those in
sentences A and B. Further, they say, should seems
more “polite” than must. In viewing should and must as interchangeable
in sentences A and B, they do not seem to differentiate between a
“soft” obligation (where should is appropriate) and a
true requirement such as a legal obligation (where must is appropriate, but should is
not). Second, the concern about “politeness” seems to indicate that
they are hesitant—perhaps because they are graduate students rather than
established scholars—to phrase things forcefully. Even after an
unexpectedly long class discussion about these questions, students
remained insecure about the distinction between should and must.
TREATMENT OF SHOULD AND MUST IN SELECTED ESL/EFL TEXTBOOKS AND REFERENCE
RESOURCES
To develop a lesson to clarify the functions of should and must in research
writing, I turned to several well-established ESL/EFL textbooks and
reference resources. However, I found that the treatment of should and must in these sources
did not provide adequate guidance for the types of contexts in which my
students were writing.
One example of a good editing textbook that goes beyond form to
discuss the function of modal verbs, and yet still did not quite meet
my students’ needs, is Writing Clearly (Lane
& Lange, in press). This textbook listed the functions of should as expressing “advisability,” “expectation,”
and “suggestion” and the functions of must as
“assumption” and “necessity” and provided example sentences for each
(pp. 64-68). For the function of expressing expectation with should, the example sentence is “The flight should
arrive on time.” Sentences such as these helpfully illustrate these
functions for a general English context, but, in my experience, they do
not speak to students who must understand these functions in the context
of research writing.
At the other end of the spectrum, The Longman Grammar
of Spoken and Written English has the advantage of working
from a corpus to provide authentic examples of should
and must in academic writing contexts (Biber,
Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999). The book lists should and must together in the
obligation/necessity category of modal verbs, which indicate “personal
obligation” and “logical necessity” (p. 494). For the function of
expressing personal obligation with should, one
example sentence is, “If the crop is to be harvested by machinery,
varieties should be cultivated which do not readily shatter.” I was
reluctant to present these kinds of examples to my students for two
reasons. First, perhaps because the sentences came from authentic texts,
they seemed difficult to understand out of context. Second, I found
room for disagreement in how some of the functions were labeled. To me,
the function of personal obligation did not seem to fit the example
sentence about what kind of crops should be cultivated—“professional
obligation” or just plain “obligation” would seem more fitting
labels.
Although I consulted several other trusted sources in hopes of
finding an explanation of modal verbs that would fit a research writing
context and answer the questions my students had asked about should and must, none of the
materials I found seemed suitable.
USE OF SHOULD AND MUST IN RESEARCH ARTICLES SELECTED BY
STUDENTS
Realizing that I would have to venture beyond ESL/EFL texts and
reference resources, I turned to sample papers the students had
provided as models of research articles in their fields. All papers were
provided in PDF format, so I used the search function in each PDF file
to find instances of should and must. Though the number and type of texts were
limited, the instances of should and
must I found were quite illuminating for the purposes of
teaching this group of students. I found usages such as the
following:
C. Although my analysis of the underwriting cycle should apply
to other types of liability insurance, this article makes a careful
study only of medical malpractice insurance. (Baker, 2005)
D. Basically, agents have to choose trading strategies, which
(given that our assumptions imply that they always store one unit of one
good at a time) amount to decision rules determining whether or not
they should trade when they have good i and meet another agent with good
j. (Kiyotaki & Wright, 1989)
E. We should be careful to point out that the moving average is
the best proxy for the optimal capital structure only of the different
leverage measures that are commonly employed in the literature. (D’Mello
& Farhat, 2008)
On the basis of my own reading of these examples as well as
discussions with session participants when presenting on this topic at
TESOL this year, I think sentences C, D, and E show should in the functions of expectation, advisability,
and obligation, respectively. In other words, the functions are
recognizably the same as or similar to the functions identified in the
textbooks and reference resources I had consulted, with the caveat that
“obligation” in a research writing context may be better characterized
as professional obligation rather than social/personal obligation. In
sentence E, it seems that the authors feel a professional obligation to
ensure that readers do not overlook a nuance of their analysis. Further,
as some session participants at TESOL pointed out, must could probably be substituted for should in sentence E. Without substantially changing
the meaning of sentence E, using must instead of should would express a stronger sense of obligation
to the authors’ readers. If students’ main question is how to
differentiate between the uses of should and must, examples like sentence E could shift the
discussion to identifying contexts where writers do and do not (as in
the case of the obligation to pay taxes) have discretion about the
degree of obligation to convey.
Next I looked at must in the research
articles selected by my students. Some example sentences are:
F. As a result of all these changes, any attempt to predict the
number and type of medical malpractice injuries must allow for a large
margin of error. (Baker, 2005)
G. If the alternative leverage ratios are good proxies for the
target capital structure then the correlation coefficients between these
measures must be close to one. (D’Mello & Farhat, 2008)
H. Our explanatory models grow from the idea that, since the
dimensions of nationalization are unrelated theoretically and (almost)
unrelated empirically, they must reflect different causal models.
(Morgenstern, Swindle, & Castagnola, 2009)
Sentence F reinforces my impression that should and must in research
writing can include a “professional obligation” function. This function
perhaps could be paraphrased as “If you’re going to do it right, this is
the one and only way to do it” (i.e., must) or “If
you’re going to do it right, this is a good way” (i.e., should). Sentence G is a conditional sentence where must seems to express logical necessity—perhaps
mathematical necessity—to the point of logical certainty. Sentence H is
not structured as a conditional, but the clause with must expresses an inference based on the ideas in the
clause before it. In that sense, sentences G and H both use
must to convey varying degrees of logical necessity.
After examining these research articles, I developed a unit to
reteach these modal verbs with the provisional idea that the functions
of should in research writing could be understood as
advisability, expectation, and professional obligation, and the
functions of must in research writing could be
understood as a stronger, nonnegotiable professional obligation and
various levels of logical necessity/inference.
UNIT FOR (RE)TEACHING SHOULD AND MUST
In the end, my approach to reteaching should
and must reflected the process I had followed in
order to better understand the use of these modal verbs in research
writing. The general steps are as follows:
- At the beginning of the semester, each student identifies
two or three “model” articles from quality peer-reviewed journals in
his/her field of study. (Students had done this already in my class
because various tasks in Academic Writing for Graduate
Students ask them to informally examine academic writing
conventions in their own fields.)
- As a homework assignment, each student compiles at least
five examples of his/her articles’ use of should and must and e-mails them to the instructor.
- From these authentic examples (such as sentences C through H
above), the instructor compiles a list of examples including at least
one sentence from each student, including multiple examples each of should and must, and representing
(in the instructor’s judgment) a variety of functions.
- In class, students work in small groups to identify the
function (e.g., expressing logical necessity) of the should or must in each sentence.
Functions are listed so that students can choose from advisability,
expectation, logical necessity/inference, and professional obligation.
(Working in small groups allows/forces students to explain their
understanding of the sentences and functions to their groupmates.)
- In class (the same day or the following class meeting)
students work in small groups to complete a cloze exercise using
additional research article example sentences in which they must choose
between should and must.
- Students complete brief in-class or take-home writing
exercises on their research topics to elicit should
and must, such as writing about preferred
methodologies, directions for future research, and/or other topics that
touch upon functions such as advisability and professional obligation.
CONCLUSION
In order for graduate students to employ important techniques
such as hedging in research writing, they need to understand and
appropriately use underlying structures such as modal verbs. However,
standard ESL/EFL editing texts and reference resources may not provide
transparent examples of how the functions of modal verbs manifest
themselves in academic research writing. In addition, these resources
may not address the way a graduate student’s use of modal verbs conveys
his or her confidence and sense of authority as a member of the
discourse community. ESL/EFL instructors aiming to help graduate
students successfully bridge the gap between proficient use of should and must in general English
and in research writing may need to go straight to the source, basing
their instruction on the use of these modal verbs in the contexts in
which their students will write.
REFERENCES
Baker, T. (2005). Medical malpractice and the insurance
underwriting cycle. University of Connecticut School of Law
Articles and Working Papers. Paper 26.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., &
Finegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written
English. Essex, England: Pearson.
D’Mello, R., & Farhat, J. (2008). A comparative
analysis of proxies for an optimal leverage ratio. Review of
Financial Economics, 17, 213-227.
Hyland, K. (1996). Writing without conviction? Hedging in
scientific research articles. Applied Linguistics,
17(4), 433-454.
Kiyotaki, N., & Wright, R. (1989). On money as a medium
of exchange. Journal of Political Economy, 97(4),
927-954.
Lane, J., & Lange, E. (2012). Writing
clearly (3rd ed.). Boston: Heinle Cengage Learning.
Morgenstern, S., Swindle, S., & Castagnola, A. (2009).
Party nationalization and institutions. Journal of Politics
71(4), 1322-1341.
Swales, J. & Feak, C. (2004) Academic writing
for graduate students. (2nd ed). Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Many thanks to the Spring 2010 class of U15 ELP 1411
Fundamentals of Research Writing for Graduate Students for their
insightful questions and for the use of their example
sentences.
Karen Schwelle is director of English language
programs at Washington University in St. Louis. Her teaching interests
include academic and research writing, pronunciation, and English for
specific purposes. She is a past chair of TESOL’s English for Specific
Purposes Interest Section. |