Modals are Auxiliary verbs or not?
This may cause some controversy but I think it is worth it.
All the teaching books refer to Modals as Auxiliary verbs.
My high ambition is to stop this practice because in my opinion they are not any form of verb.
To be clear here are the Modals I am referring to:
can - could
will - would
shall - should
may - might
used to - ought to
must
None of them can stand alone except as short answers to a sentence that has already established the actual verb being talked about.
Students looking for the equivalent of a Modal as a Spanish verb will not find one.
Modals cannot be conjugated. They have no past tense, no future tense, no continuous form, no future form and no perfect form. How can they be classified as verbs?
One of the first things Spanish students of English "learn" is that "I can" is "puedo". From then on the Modals confuse them.
As Modals are a very important part of the English language I would like to see them taught in a different way.
In my opinion Modals act more like Adverbs than Auxiliary verbs because they modify the real verb they are associated with.
The real Auxiliary verbs "to be" - "to do" - "to have" are also real verbs in their own right.
What do others think?
Or I my ambitions too high or simply wrong?
2 Answers
Well, I don't think your ambitions are out of line for one minute. After all, we want to do whatever it takes to have our students understand.
Naturally, if we are part of a larger faculty, there are restrictions to us going off and doing our own thing.
I really do take your point about the adverbial qualities of the modals.
If you are restricted by your administration, tradition, colleagues and the community to teaching English by the grammar/translation method, you may be facing a huge challenge. As you know, that method works well with certain students, but it hardly addresses the learning styles of all of the students.
Is it possible to set the book aside for a week or two and do your own approach to the instruction of this material? If you can do that, and not even analyze it grammatically, you might [perfect example of a modal used as an adverb] be able to cut through the whole need to give it a name. Then once you've established the pattern with the students and they have a good mastery of it, when you tell them what these things are, and at that point it really doesn't matter what the things are called, because the students can already use them.
Ah, yes...the challenges of teaching language! It's such a rewarding career, but I wonder sometimes if those of us who do it for several decades get just a tiny bit too excited about things like tenses, moods, why this noun and not that noun... it's a special gift, Ian Hill, and your students are fortunate to have a teacher who cares so much.
Here is a website: (http://www.englishpage.com/modals/modalintro.html) that has an explanation of modals as well as tests to ascertain your grasp of them. It has some good information. (Sorry, I cannot figure out the magic combination to make links!)
