Subject Verb in a Passive Voice Teaching Evaluation

Part One. Introduction
We always say things like, ’English is spoken by the majority of people in the world.’ or ’the cheese is eaten by my sister.’ Further more, a great amount of proverbs are said like, ’Rome was not built in one day’. Actually, passive voice penetrates into our daily life and more professional fields. Compare with the straightforward relationship between subject and verb in a context, the relationship of subject and verb in a passive voice context is that the subject receives the action of the verb. We utilize passive voice in communication or compositions to express specific meanings and convey particular information, rather than rich the sentence pattern without knowing whether it is necessary or not.

After analysis the example of Miss Wong, it is not difficult to find out the dilemma teachers and students are always encountered with in the grammar lessons. As to the students, after acquiring the passive voice grammatical point, they usually simply shift active voice form to passive voice form without knowing the purposes and meanings. After intensive exercises, students are forced to accept the ‘auxiliary plus a past participle’ formula to express passive voice. Generally speaking, students can concur some simple conditions and do well in traditional examinations with the traditional teaching methods, however, when encountering with more complicated conditions, students may lose their discretion.

In terms of the paper, a critical evaluation of Miss Wong’s teaching methodology will be represented in the first part, and it will contain its characteristics and the main currents as far as teaching of grammar is concerned. Then, in the second part, I will discuss the pedagogical implications of Miss Wong’s ap...

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2. Take account of individual differences in learners (Ellis 2005), teachers are supposed to adopt more flexible teaching approaches to fit every student to the greatest extent.
3. Try to create a pure English environment in the classroom, and encourage students to use target grammatical instructions out of classroom. To do that, teachers should improve their English language use ability first. Actually, in most situations, like William Littlewood said, students may communicate in the mother tongue or use only minimal English without constant monitoring, rather than extending their English competence, therefore, teachers should give enough control and monitor to their students.
4. Avoid purely communicative syllabuses (Long, 1991) in grammar teaching processes, communicative activities only will lead to insufficient English elementary grammatical knowledge.