Acquisition_of_Passives

1.0 Materials This selected passage is an initial part of online news reported by Cindy George and Jenalia Moreno from Houston Chronicle. It is about an accident caused by computer glitch. This accident happened in the air fright. Air traffic across Central and Southeast Texas on Wednesday afternoon was stopped or postponed due to this accident, worse still, many other flight were also halted or delayed. 2.0 Participants Twenty students attend this course. Among them, there are twelve boys and eight girls, whose age ranges from 15 to 17 years old. These students come from China, South Korea, Japan and other Asian countries, and they are not native speakers of English, they all speak their mother tongue at home before coming here and they have learned English as a foreign language for years range from four to six. All of them have been here for three months to six months. I did pre-test to examine the language proficiency, and the result shows that their language proficiency is of low level, what’s more, they do not do well the in use of passive voices in English. 3.0 Feature of passive voice A passive construction occurs when you make the object of an action into the subject of a sentence. That is, whoever or whatever is performing the action is not the grammatical subject of the sentence. Peter and Pam (2004) noted that a sentence that has passive voice is named passive sentence and a verb phrase which has passive voice is called passive verb. Passive voice is a very important feature of English, which has its unique features in English, the sentences given below (a) is what is called an active sentence and (b) is a passive. a) Jack broke a bottle b) A bottle was broken by Jack The two sentences do not have the same meaning in a narrow way, the first sentence concerns a boy called Jack and what he did. The second sentence is about a bottle and what was done to it. In traditional grammar, the two nouns plays different roles in the sentence, to be specific, Jack is the agent in the sentence and bottle is the patient. Carnie (2001) indicated that the two kinds of sentences describe the same event with the same two participants. The basic grammatical structure is a passive is 1. Patient+be+ v+ed/ v+en + by+ agent. 2/ Patient+be+ being+v+ed/ v+en + by+ agent. 3. Patient+aux+be+ v+ed/ v+en + by+ agent. 4. Patient+has/have/had+been+ v+ed/ v+en + by+ agent. Note that patient is sometime called logic object and agent is sometimes called logic subject. 4.0 Passive sentences in the passage and its difficulties. The following are passive sentences used in the passage. In these sentences passive verbs are in bold. 1. A 90-minute computer glitch that halted and delayed air traffic across Central and Southeast Texas on Wednesday afternoon is the latest black eye for the Federal Aviation Administration, which has been criticized in recent weeks for air traffic controllers sleeping on the job and a near-miss incident involving a plane carrying first lady Michelle Obama. 2. All Houston outbound and inbound planes were affected until the technical issue was fully resolved around 6:15 p.m. 3. That included about 40 Continental Airlines flights that were delayed up to an hour and several Southwest Airlines flights across the Central Texas region that were delayed an average of 15 minutes, air carriers reported. 4. Flights headed to Houston from Love Field and the larger Dallas-Fort Worth airport were slowed down in the air or delayed, though Lunsford could not provide a specific number. 5. And last month, a White House plane carrying the First Lady was diverted after coming dangerously close to a military cargo jet as a result of an air traffic controller's mistake. The first sentence is the most difficult one in the five sentences. It has a very long and heavy subject and passive is used in present perfect tense in a relative clause which makes it difficult for learners to understand. As a result, students must pay much more attention to the tense of the sentence and the grammatical structure of the sentence. The following four sentences are relatively easier for participants to understand, for passives are used in past tense, which is in line with the basic structure of passives. What is interesting is that there are two passive voices in the second and third sentence. The former may be harder to comprehend than the latter. 5.0 How to use the materials Students will first have to know the basic structure of English and master the way of transforming a verb into its past participants. And also, students are required to look up the new word in the passage so that so can understand the passage without the negative effects of new words, Students will be divided into five groups each of which has four members and a group is selected to represent his team to present their ideas. First, all students are required to read through the passage to get the main idea of the passage and discuss it between group members. This step is used to guarantee that each student has understood the passage. Second, the leader of each group will give a presentation to talk about the content of the passage clearly and thoroughly. Third, students are asked to find the passive voices in the passage as many as possible, the group that finds the most number of passive sentences will be the winner and get a small gift as a reward. Fourth, there are some exercises which require them to change active sentences into their passive forms. Attention must be paid to tense and the form of the verb. Each group is required to complete the exercises together; again their final answer will be presented by the leader to other students. As last, the teacher will evaluate their performance according to the scores they made and decide which group achieves the best. 6.0 References: Carbie, A. (2001). Syntax. Blackwell Publishers. Peters, Pam (2004). The Cambridge Guide to English Usage. Cambridge University Press