This preference for the passive voice exemplifies and confirms the trait of de-personalisation in a specialist text: the focus is not on the doer of the action (here, the teacher) but on what is being done. Passive sentences without an agent are the most frequent de-personalisation device in English.
While drawing the readers' attention to some points, the authors present them as objectively noteworthy and not as their subjective choice.
In the corpus should is used mainly to express what teachers are to do to comply with the authors' methodological and practical suggestions. However, the verb to teach is only used twice and the noun teacher/s occurs only eight times in the subset with should:
in two cases teacher is not the subject and should is not used deontically;
in the two cases where teacher is the explicit agent, the subject is words;
In the following sentence teacher and should are separated by the reference to corrections:
[...] these [on the spot corrections] should not have the effect of diverting attention away from the message to the language.
Teacher/s can be found as the subject of should only three times — all of them in the same paper. The past participle taught occurs six times (including the derivative pretaught). Other verbs are preferably used, all of them, however, describing actions for which the teacher is responsible. Teacher is the logical subject of eight forms of use in the subset: four nouns, two to–infinitives and two past participles.
In the same paragraph, the teachers interlocutors, that is the learners, are mentioned 9 times, but only once as the subject of should in active form:
I take them to be words Intermediate learners should know.
— two more times as the subject of should in passive where the understood agent is the teacher, who has to teach them certain words systematically and to convince them to use only some compound forms. In the other cases reference is made mainly to some features of the groups being taught; besides, the word occurs in the phrase learner population.
Student/s is found 15 times in the subset: twice as the subject of should and then as in the following examples.
Judicious selection should ensure that students are furnished with texts in which the important information is expressed in comprehensible terms.
Procedure One should not be used with students whose level of spoken fluency is not adequate for the task [...]
In the corpus, teacher/s occurs 118 times (to which we can add colleagues with a frequency of 13), while student/s has 180 occurrences, learner/s/'s 138 and beginners 12 (totalling 330).
The recourse to other subjects of should is also frequent: for instance, textbook/s; a course...should; vocabulary (should be pretaught); words. Other references to the contents of the courses and to what they require is found in sentences like:
As a rough guide the texts should be equivalent to about 3/4 of an A4 page. The texts for one lesson should all be about the same length to ensure a more or less equal reading phase for each student.
The texts should be comprehensible to readers with basic medical knowledge.
The structure of the texts should preferably be that of main point plus supporting details and/or examples, [...] .
The texts should contain information that will be new and/or controversial to the readers.
The four last examples, whose subject is texts, attest to the importance attributed to textuality as a dimension in analysing and teaching a language.
What all this implies is that not all the responsibility falls on the teacher: the structure of the courses is not always decided by him or her — in one case reference is made to the course planner who might not be the same person as the teacher; not all teachers write their own textbooks (although they are always responsible for the choice among those that are available), and so on. In a way, the writers recognise that there may be good reasons for not following their recommendations, or for following them only in part.
The strategy is clear: they avoid saying to the teacher "(you must) do this" but they prefer to focus on the students' needs and on the specific features of English for Specific (Medical) Purposes. In this way, the methodologist can further remove his or her presence: if "you should" corresponds to "I order that you (on the basis of my expertise)…", a sentence like "the meaning should be learned…" seems to hint at an objective necessity; the road between deontic and alethic modality is short and the boundary is ill-defined in various places.
Many more remarks could be made about the tools for persuasion, which are sometimes related with should only indirectly; an example could be the use of adjectives: judicious selection --> the teacher selects judiciously --> the teacher, who selects, should be judicious: the "scelta oculata" is an abstract term but has a well-defined doer.
The following examples contain should not followed by active or passive forms of the main verb; they will be useful to see whether (or to what extent) we can say should not conveys an idea of "prohibition". In one case, it corresponds to Italian ‘non si deve' in the sense that ‘it is conceptually incorrect':
But sensitivity to word order should not be underestimated.
In most cases, the dominant idea is that of ‘an action that is didactically ineffective, unwise and therefore not advisable':
These sorts of texts should not be used if, for example, our aims are to develop skills in reading medical journals [...]
[...] they should not be hidden in a jungle of colloquialisms.
These [procedures] should not have the effect of diverting attention...
The partner changing should not be synchronised.
Of course a set of questions is suitable too, but they should be few in number and open in character, i.e. they should not require a specific item of information.
The teacher [...] should not interpret the law literally.
By way of summing up, let us re-examine the uses of should also from a comparative (English vs. Italian) perspective. We have found that this modal:
a) is seldom used for what traditional grammars call the first persons of the conditional mood, where it has been almost totally replaced by would. This tendency has been active for several decades now and seems to have increased in recent years;
b) still in terms of Italian grammar, it would be more realistic to describe should as an auxiliary of the subjunctive mood. After if, it conveys the idea of an "undesirable possible future event". In any case, a description in terms of moods is reductive if compared with a description in terms of modality;
c) by far, the most frequent cases in the corpus are those where should has a deontic value that is stronger and more binding than Italian dovrebbe, in the sense that the latter conveys an idea of "optionality" that can be lessened but not eliminated; si dovrebbe is never used for directions or instructions like those that are expressed by means of should in the corpus;
d) we can find a few cases of epistemic should referring to a "likely event"; it is sometimes difficult to decide whether the correct interpretation is "è probabile/verosimile che" or "sarebbe bene/opportuno che":
The work is hard, but if the course runs well the participants work even harder. And the experience should be enjoyable for all.
The communicative intention conveyed by should may be interpreted either as a suggestion or as a supposition, which is perfectly symmetrical with Italian dovrebbe. The writer may have been deliberately ambiguous in order to leave both interpretations open.
The objective of this analysis(25) has been to highlight how the value and meaning of any modal verb must be traced in the text, in each of the sentences where it occurs and with reference to the context. Each of the other modal verbs can be analysed in a similar way — which provides a deeper and closer understanding of how they work, much more accurate than the elementary descriptions usually found in grammar books.