Teaching Passive Voice

Inspector

At the beginning of most English courses, students focus on learningactive voice structures. It is usually the easiest way for them tophrase sentences but as students progress in their studies, they willencounter passive voice sentences. Since this is an entirely newstructure, spend plenty of time on the introduction and conduct severalcomprehension checks along the way.How To Proceed

1
Warm up
Asking questions such as “What sport do you play?”and writing both the response and the student’s name on the board withgive you some material to work with during your introduction of passivevoice. It will also give your students some quality speaking practice.
2
Introduce
Using the example above, show students the difference between “Andy plays basketball.” and “Basketball is played by Andy.”Explain how in one sentence the subject is Andy who is actively doingsomething. In the second sentence the focus is shifted to basketballwhich is now the subject but is not actively doing anything. In passive voice, the verb is done to the subject as opposed to the subject doing the verb.This whole concept will be completely different from what your studentshave studied so far so it is important to reinforce this concept asmuch as possible during your introduction and practice stages.
3
Practice Passive Voice
As a class have studentschange responses given in the warm up from active to passive voice. Ifthey are doing well, call on students individually or ask forvolunteers to do the same thing. This will give the class as a wholesome practice and also test comprehension individually. You can ask forstudents to tell you the subject and verb of sentences and also ask fortranslations as part of this exercise.
4
Practice Passive Voice More
Use a worksheet togive students further practice. In one exercise have students circlethe correct form of the verb to complete both passive and activesentences. To do this they will have to understand the sentences wellso use simple sentences and vocabularythey are very familiar with. In another activity have students fill inthe blank with the correct form of the verb. You can also includeScrambled where students have to rearrange words to form agrammatically correct sentence. Lastly, students can do a writingexercise. The easiest way to do this is to write very short, simple,active voice sentences for students to rewrite using passive voice. Asentence such as “He built the house in 1951.” should become “The house was built in 1951 by him.”There are many activities you can include to give students furtherpractice. Mixing active and passive voice sentences into every sectionof the worksheet will challenge students and help to determine whetheror not they understand the difference between the two.
5
Discuss Passive Voice
Now that your studentshave had some practice using the passive voice on sentences they willmost likely not encounter in their English studies, talk about whenpassive voice would commonly be used. The passive voice is used to emphasize the object or when the person or thing doing the action is unknown. Passive voice is often seen in newspapers, for instance “Eight stores have been robbed in the past three weeks.” politics, and science.
6
Produce
Ask students to write three to five oftheir own passive voice sentences. Have volunteers read sentences aloudand give translations for further speaking practice and comprehensionchecks. At the end of class, collect these sentences to correct anymistakes and return to students another day. This will give you a goodidea of how well your students understand and use this structure aswell as how to proceed with your lessons.
7
Review
Ask your students to summarize what theylearned in class. If they can explain passive voice to you, then theyare probably doing quite well understanding it themselves. If studentsstruggle, lead them to say at least a few major points regardingpassive voice and make a note to review everything further in a laterlesson.

Most English students will not have much need for the passive voicestructure at this time but it will come up every so often in readingsso it is best to cover the material thoroughly and make an effort toinclude it in other exercises.

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Honour Member

I consider passive voice teaching as a big challenge to any teacher because of the complication that learners find when dealing with tense shift and , especially, word order. Thank you, madam, for the tips.