July 2011
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SHOULD OR MUST? RETEACHING MODAL VERBS FOR RESEARCH WRITING
Karen Schwelle, Washington University in St. Louis

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:

  1. 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.)
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.)
  5. 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.
  6. 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.

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