- Focal adjustment (or shift): With the passive voice, refers to changing the semantics of an utterance by changing the emphasis of the action, away from who did it and toward its simply having been done. “The passive allows speakers to make a kind of figure/ground reversal.”
- Transitive v. intransitive verbs: Transitive verbs co-occur with subjects and objects and can be inflected for the past tense. Only transitive verbs can be used in the passive. Intransitive verbs do not take a direct object.
- Subject v. agent: the subject represents the thing or person that the action is happening to, and the agent is that action.
- Past participles (and ways of facilitating their learning): It can be tricky distinguishing being a past participle and a passive construction. Sometimes meaning is not explicit at the sentential level: “The windows were broken.” Depending on context, “broken” could be adjectival or passive. “The past participle is descriptive, or stative, and thus adjectival” OR “The past participle is dynamic and thus passive.” A suggestion the book makes in these ambiguous situations, when we have both (a dynamic adjectival), is to insert “by” with a noun phrase after the verb, and see what happens.
How to deal with errors
1. The Camry has produced by Toyota.
Here the student knew that the sentence required the passive voice — perhaps noticing the cue “by” — so his/her problem was not with meaning or use but form. S/he also knew that the past tense was needed. In fact, this may have been a mistake rather than an error, and the student might self-correct once given the opportunity to notice. If not, a review of form would be the next step. So we might gather a lot of examples with singular and plural forms in the past, brainstorming for verbs/sentences. We could gather examples using “to be” (as needed here) and also examples with “to have” for comparison between the two.
2. The accident was occurred around five in the evening.
In this case the student is confused about form and use: all three. The student needs to understand that the passive can’t work here for two reasons. First is a form reason: the verb is intransitive, so it can’t become passive. The second reason is use-related: “accident” is doing the action, not being acted upon, so we need the simple past.
3. “Suddenly when I stepped, my foot buried in the ground.” [Alejandro, age 16, native Spanish speaker in Mexico, written error]
This is the only passive error I collected. One way I might have approached it would have been to change “bury” it to a verb that would work in the simple past in this context, such as “sunk.” Or I could have explained that the foot is having the action DONE to it, not doing the action, so it requires passive form. And then introduce maybe the “to be” form of passive.
Teaching Thoughts
Grammar in Context (5th Edition) Level 2, Lesson 13: Uses theme of “the law” to explore passives: the Constitution, jury duty, voting and “unusual lawsuits.” [“In 2002, a group of teenagers sued several fast-food chains [could get them to change it to passive] for serving food that made them fat…”] Discussion: are drivers permitted to use cellphones? and other legal issues in the news. This series uses “form, meaning and use” organizing principle.
My idea: get them to change stuff in that story to passive. Get them to make up their own strange lawsuit.
The ELT Grammar Book
A map: What happens here? Use manipulatives. Grain is grown in the Midwest. Soldiers are trained…
Cut apart a map and get Ss to say what is done in each state. or region.
List of places in a city: gym, bank, etc: What is done here. Like BASTA: 5 places. Give Ss a point for each passive that no one else has thought of .
Tell brief story-lettes and get Ss to make up headline. Big Ugly man killed.
Flow chart of events with far-reaching consequences. People can live to 150. UFO lands on power station —> electricity cut —> businesses closed —> transportation is halted —> birth rate is doubled…