Acquisition of Passives
- Submitted by: majunzhou
- Views: 513
- Category: English
- Date Submitted: 09/28/2011 07:28 AM
- Pages: 5
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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...
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...