Lesson
| level | Skill | Age | Time | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pre | Grammar: Passive Voice | Adults / YL | 40 |  |
|
Click on the links above to get straight to the lesson, what follows is my thought process in putting the lesson together
Why I designed this class
The passive voice with lower levels
This is an activity that I use to teach the passive voice to lower level classes. Coursebooks usually introduce the passive voice somewhere around the end of pre-intermediate level. Typically, the focus in on the present and past simple passive and more the complex tenses are only introduced at Intermediate and Upper Intermediate.
I find that the practice activities in most pre-intermediate books focus on getting the form correct and don’t really address the difference in meaning between active and passive sentences.
Students often have difficulty recognising that the subject of a passive sentence is not the ‘doer’ of the action. This leads to errors like:
- The robbers were stolen all the money.
- Malaria are infected people in Africa.
- Old people are suffered from health problems.
The verb forms in the sentences above are correct but the students are clearly confused about the function of the passive voice. Getting students to complete sentences about pairs of objects in the passive voice can force them to address way the passive voice is used.
For example:
Complete the sentence in the passive voice …
Venus and Mars are both …
- Weaker students might produce sentences such as:
- Venus and Mars are both planets in our solar system (correct but not passive)
- Venus and Mars are both travelled around the sun (incorrect, shouldn’t be passive)
Stronger students might produce sentences such as:
- Venus and Mars are both visited by spaceships.
- Venus and Mars are both studied by astromers.
The challenge of finding similarities between the objects makes the it fun for students. The focus of the activity is also clearly on the meaning of the passive rather than the form.
Check-out the worksheet for the full activity.
Further reading
| Author | Title | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mahina Cooray | The English Passive Voice | |