Teaching Passive Voice: ideas for your classes (Part 1)

 

Students find some grammar structures easier, others - more difficult. One of the reasons why this happens is that there is no such grammatical structure in the students' native language, and they cannot associate it with anything. Passive Voice is one of them because, for example, the Ukrainian language avoids passive constructions. Naturally, in our language, "the workers repair the house" or "the singer performs a song", or "a friend invites you to a birthday party", not "the house is repaired by workers", "the song is performed by a singer", or "you are invited by a friend to a birthday party".  Although Passive Voice is less frequently used in English, students have to be able to use it especially if they intend to take Cambridge exams, ZNO or EVI, or to be able to write academic texts for IELTS or write formal correspondence or speak in formal situations, etc. Of course, in order to learn to use this grammatical construction correctly, you need a lot of controlled practice. At this stage, students will learn to use the Passive Voice in a limited context by doing gapfills, multiple choice,  grammar code activities, or correcting mistakes, etc. However, it is necessary to give them the opportunity to use this grammatical structure more freely, in a relaxing atmosphere and in situations close to real communication. We have selected some interesting activities you can do with your students. These are ideas that can be easily adapted to your students’ needs and the teaching context.

Describing a process

Passive Voice is most often used in English to describe various processes, for example, in production, in IT, at the airport, and in hospitals, services, and so on. This grammar structure will be needed if you teach business English, for example, and the task itself does not require any prep. First, ask students to make a drawing of a process and then describe it. The topic should match the topic of the lesson. You can also choose the tense or aspect you need: present, past or future, simple, perfect, progressive or perfect progressive. For example, here is how IT specialists could describe “Online transactions”; The order is placed by the customer. The availability of the product is confirmed by the seller’s service, and the response is sent. After that, the payment request is sent to the customer.

Information Gap Speaking Activity

Information gaps is a favourite type of task for many colleagues because it can be adapted to almost any topic in vocabulary or grammar as well as performed both online and in the regular classroom. Students are divided into pairs A and B. Each is given the appropriate worksheet: Student A and Student B. They must fill in the blanks in the table. To do this, they need to ask questions to their partner using Passive Voice. When all the blanks are filled, students compare the answers with each other. Again, the topics can be different depending on what you are teaching. For, example: Famous Artists Inventions One of the alternatives of the Information gap is a task in which students have to spot the differences in pictures. For example, you can describe what has changed in a particular area, room, and so on. From Grade Center