Passive Voice on Teaching Grammar

Passive Voice

A passive forms of a verb is made by using tenses of the auxiliaries be followed by the past participle of a verb.

Tense	Structure	Example
Simple present	Am/are/is + pp	English is spoken here
Present progressive	Am/are/is being + pp	Excuse the mess, the house is being painted
Simple past	Was/were + pp	I wasn’t invited, but I went away
Past progressive	Was/were being + pp	I felt as if I was being watched
Present perfect	Have/ has been + pp	Has Mary been told?
Past perfect	Had been + pp	I knew why I had been chosen
Future (will) Future (going to)	Will be + pp Am/is/are going to be + pp	You’ll be told when the time comes Who’s going to be invited?
Future perfect	Will have been + pp	Everything will have been done by Tuesday

Future progressive passives (will be being + pp) and perfect progressive passives (e.g. has been being + pp) are unusual. Examples of passive infinitives: (to) be taken; (to) have been invited. Examples of passive- ing forms: being watched, having been invited. Not all verbs can have passive forms. Passive structures are impossible with intransitive verbs like die or arrive, which do not have objects, because there is nothing to become the subject of a passive sentence. Some transitive verbs, too, are seldom used in the passive. Most of these are ‘stative verbs’ (verbs which refer to states, not actions). Examples are fit, have, lack, resemble, suit. (Swan, 408-409: 1995). Passive verb form is often used in the following situations: (1) when we want to talk about an action, but are not interested in saying who or what does/ did it. Passive without ‘agent’- the person or thing that does the action, are common on academic and scientific writing for this reason; For example; Too many books have been written about the second world war; (2) When it is not known or unimportant to know exactly who performs an action, for example; our house was built in 1890; (3) When we want to begin a sentence with something that is already known, or that we are already talking about, and to put the ‘news’ at the end and often including agents, for example:  John’s painting my portrait (active verb so that the ‘news’- the portrait – can go at the end.  ‘Nice picture.’, “Yes, it was painted by my grandmother.’ (passive verb so that the ‘news’ –the painter- can go at the end). The construct of the passive voice mastery are as follows: passive voice mastery in which mastery means complete knowledge or great skill (Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary: 721), and passive voice is the subject which is taught to the students including understanding the passive voice forms/rules, and the use of passive voice. In conclusion passive voice mastery means the students’ complete knowledge or great skill about understanding passive voice forms/rules and their use in daily use. Understanding the forms and rules here include: passive voice  the rules –in the tenses and modals in which passive voice are commonly used - present tense, present continuous  tense, past tense, present perfect tense, past perfect tense, future tense, and modal passive. Furthermore, the use of the passive voice here means the students’ understanding about the different use of the passive and active voice. 

   

Teaching Grammar

The Reasons of Teaching Grammar

Grammar teaching has always been one of the most controversial and least understood aspects of language teaching. Few people remain indifferent to grammar and many become obsessed by it.  There are many arguments for putting grammar in the foreground in second language teaching. They are: The sentence-machine argument, Grammar is a description of the regularities in a language, and knowledge of these regularities provides the learner with the means to generate a potentially enormous number of original sentences. The number of the possible new sentences is constrained only by the vocabulary at he learner’s command and his or her creativity. Grammar is a kind of ‘sentence-making machine’. It follows that the teaching of grammar offers the learner the means for potentially limitless linguistic creativity. The fine-tuning argument, Written language is more explicit than spoken language, for example, the following examples contain errors likely to confuse the reader: After speaking a lot time with him I thought that him attracted me. We took a wrong plane and when I saw it was very later because the plane took up. The teaching of grammar serves as a corrective against the kind of ambiguity represented in these examples. The fossilization argument, Research suggests that learners who receive no instruction seem to be at risk of fossilizing sooner than those who do receive instruction. So, in order to avoid the learner’ linguistics competence fossilizes (difficult to progress) grammar instruction is needed. The advance-organizer argument, Advance-organizer means that grammar instruction also has a delayed effect, the effect as a prerequisite for acquisition that will influence the learners learning. The discrete item argument Language, any language, seen from outside, can seem to  be a gigantic, shapeless mass, presenting an insuperable challenge for the  learner. Because grammar consists of an apparently finite set of rules, it can help to reduce the apparent enormity of the language learning task for both teachers and students. By tidying language up and organizing it into neat categories (sometimes called discrete items), grammarian make language digestible. The rule-of-law argument, Grammar is a system of learnable rule; it lends itself to a view of teaching and learning known as transmission. A transmission view sees the role of education as the transfer of a body of knowledge (typically in the form of facts and rules) from those that have the knowledge to those that do not. Such a view is typically associated with the kind of institutionalized learning where rules, order, and discipline are highly valued. The need for rules, order, and discipline is particularly acute in large classes of unruly and unmotivated teenagers, a situation that many teachers of English are confronted with daily. In this sort of situation grammar offers the teacher a structured system that can be taught and tested in methodical steps.