Improving Students Passive Voice Mastery

Grammar of a particular language is a complete system which makes one language different from another. We know that German is different from French, for example. They sound and look different. What makes them different is a matter of grammar. Their grammars are different. The term grammar refers to the explicit theory constructed by the linguist and proposed as a description of the speaker’s competence but on the other side grammar also refers to the speaker’s competence itself. The sounds and sounds pattern, the basic units of meaning, such as words, and the rules to combine them to form new sentences constitute the grammar of the language. The grammar then, represents our linguistic competence. Ur in Nunan states that grammar may be roughly defined as the way language manipulates and combines words (or bits of words) in order to form longer units of meaning.” (2005: 2).Grammar has to do with the way in which units of language, principally words, come together to form sentences. Such sentences are acceptable or grammatical, if they follow the rules specified by grammarians. There is a rule in the grammar such as “Every sentence has a noun phrase subject and a verb phrase predicate”. When we say that a sentence is grammatical, we mean that it conforms to the rules, on the other hand, an ungrammatical sentence deviates in someway from these rules. Every grammar is equally complex, logical, and capable of producing an infinite set of sentences to express any thought. One of the goals of grammar study is to improve oral and written expression to get the students to speak and write better. If grammar rules are too carelessly violated, communication, both written or orally, may suffer. When grammar has been mastered, it will support their English skills, such as speaking, writing, (mostly), reading and listening. It is an important thing to improve the students’ mastery in grammar. In teaching grammar to advanced students (university students are in the advanced level) there are three key principles as follows: (1) helping learners to identify the relationship between grammar and discourse; (2) encouraging learners to explore differences between spoken and written English; and (3) giving learners systematic exposure to authentic language and data (Nunan, 2000: 119). At this level, it is often more a matter of determining whether or not a sentence is grammatically corrects than in deciding whether it is appropriate with the context in which it appears. The example of how discourse affects the grammatical structure of a sentence is in the use of the passive voice. It expresses the action that is done to the subject. It indicates that the apparent subject of a verb is the person or thing undergoing, not performing the action of the verb. The traditional way of teaching the passive was to provide students with a list of statements in the active voice (The boy broke the window), furnishing a model of how to transform the active voice sentences into their passive equivalents (The window was broken by the boy), and then let them get on with transforming the active forms into passive. While such a practice is fine for teaching how to form the passive, it gives no insight into why we have the passive or when we use it. It doesn’t explain what the passive functions are in English. The condition of the teaching learning process in grammar lesson is sometimes lack of variety, a bit dry, and boring, unsatisfied for the students and having unsatisfying result. A male student BAW said that “Grammar lesson is difficult Mom, I often feel frustrated on studying it”. About the situation of the teaching learning process a female student SW explained that “ there is no variation on the teaching learning process, the teacher always use the same book and there is no enough example of the use of the passive voice”. The students haven’t understood the forms of the passive voice, how to differ its usage and function, and how to apply in their own sentence. Generally, the students’ conditions in the teaching learning process are as follows: (1) they think that grammar lesson is a difficult subject, so they are afraid and lack of self-confident to make their own sentence; (2) they are passive students, have no eagerness to ask questions, only the ones who are active ask the question especially the one who has taken a private course; (3) they seldom do preparation before joining the lesson. They are waiting what the lecturer will give to them; (4) they are lack of motivation, have no attention during the lesson, yawn and ask when the lesson ends; (5) they seldom practice independently about the lesson, for example in making sentences and doing the exercises individually; and (6) they have difficulty when applying the passive form in real world and also comprehending its function. The effects of those conditions are; (1) the teaching learning process is boring and uninteresting; (2) the discussion does not run well because there are not many responses and questions from the students; (3) the teaching learning process is teacher-centered, only teacher who talks in the classroom and dominates the class; (4) the result of their examination is unsatisfying- only some students get A and B, most of them get C and even D. The sources of the problems that arise above can be identified as follows: 1) students don’t participate actively in the class; they just receive what are given to them, 2) the monotonous teaching technique and materials that are used and presented by the teacher, deductive technique and textbook materials. 3) Students are lack of practice in applying the materials that are taught. The teaching learning process is based on the textbook and grammar is presented deductively, in which the teacher presents the grammar rule and then gives students exercise to the rules. It   makes the students get difficulties in understanding the concept, also makes them think that learning a language is simply to know the rules. In addition they find difficulties in applying them both written and orally in the daily usage. So, in order to reach the desirable goal effectively, it needs certain teaching technique and media that can make the teaching learning process more interesting and also can be used to solve those problems above. The technique that will be used is using inductive approach in which the teacher presents the samples of the language and the students have to come to an intuitive understanding of the rules. It provides a lot of examples so the pattern of usage can be seen and also help the students to be more aware of the uses of the language (Carter, Hughes, and McCarthy, 2000: viii). The samples of the language are taken from the authentic materials. Authentic material according to Richards (2001: 252) refers to the use in teaching of texts, photographs, video selection, and other teaching resources that are not specially prepared for pedagogical purposes, while created materials refer to textbook and others specially developed for instructional resources. Authentic materials contain authentic language and reflect real-world uses of language compared with the contrived content of much created material. So it is not the material that is prepared for the teaching material. By using this material the students will be given the exposure about the language that is really used in daily life. It is helpful for the students to invent the language and find the modification of the authentic language in order to illustrate the rules.  Furthermore, the authentic materials are realistic, ready to use and relevant to the students’ mindset and experience. By giving exposure to the students, they will get ready before the lesson and know the application of the rule that they learnt in the real world. Current popular materials, such as clips from mass media and best-selling essays/short stories, have been found most appealing because of their realism, ready-to-use and relevance to learners' mindsets and experiences. English textbooks, written by educators rather than professional writers, tend to carry a preaching and patronizing tone. The usage of authentic materials will supply interesting and new teaching learning process.