Error Analysis in Using Passive Voice among University Students: Comparative Taxonomy

<p>Passive voice is commonly preferred in certain genres such as academic essays and news reports, despite the current trends promoting active voice, it is essential for learners to be fully aware of the meaning, use and form of passive voice to better communicate. This study aims to explore ways to help English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners notice and revise voice in English and raise their awareness of when and how to use active and passive voice to convey meaning in their written and spoken work. The study focuses on a different approach to be taken to teach voice in English, which might help students become more aware of the use of passive voice. The issues related to the use of passive voice are derived from the work of EFL learners who failed to make sensible decisions about when and how to use passive voice partly because the differences between their mother tongue and English and because they were not aware of the fact that active and passive voice would not alternate all the time.</p>

Passive voice is commonly preferred in certain genres such as academic essays and news reports, despite the current trends promoting active voice, it is essential for learners to be fully aware of the meaning, use and form of passive voice to better communicate. This study aims to explore ways to help English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners notice and revise voice in English and raise their awareness of when and how to use active and passive voice to convey meaning in their written and spoken work. The study focuses on a different approach to be taken to teach voice in English, which might help students become more aware of the use of passive voice. The issues related to the use of passive voice are derived from the work of EFL learners who failed to make sensible decisions about when and how to use passive voice partly because the differences between their mother tongue and English and because they were not aware of the fact that active and passive voice would not alternate all the time. Article visualizations:

This study replicated and extended Wright (2006) and Whitehurst, Ironsmith, and Goldfein (1974) by examining whether preschool aged children would increase their use of passive grammatical voice rather than using the more age-appropriate active grammatical construction when the former was modeled by an adult. Results showed that 5 of the 6 participants began using the passive voice after this verbal behavior had been modeled. For 3 of the participants, this change was large. The change occurred even though the adult model explicitly rewarded the participant with praise and stickers for using the active voice, while providing no praise or stickers for using the passive form that was modeled. For 1 participant, the modeling procedure had no effect on use of the passive voice. These results indicate a strong automatic reinforcement effect of achieving parity with the grammatical structures used by adults, compared to the effects of explicit reinforcement by the adult. This might help to explain why children acquire grammatical structures prevalent in their language community apparently without explicit instruction.

Students in learning English grammar often experience difficulties, and are influenced by the first language, namely Indonesian. Students are influenced by the first language, Indonesian, in composing passive sentences and changing active sentences into passive sentences without first identifying the tense used. The students' difficulties in composing passive sentences resulted in difficulties in writing text properly. This is because most students do not understand how to change the active voice to the passive voice, use auxiliary verbs, and identify the tense. The study uses descriptive qualitative method that aims to analyze errors in the preparation of English passive sentences made by the 4th semester students of the English Education Study Program, Tadulako University. In arranging the passive form and which passive form is the most difficult for students to understand and after analyzing the students' mistakes in composing passive sentences, the researchers concluded that of the 50 students who became respondents, the problems that students make in composing passive sentences are 1) changing word order caused by not being able to distinguish between subject and object, 2) not understanding the tense used in active sentences resulting in a change in the auxiliary verb form, 3) reducing or eliminating one of the constituent elements passive, such as the BY preposition, auxiliary verb be, or the suffix –ED to the regular verb. 4) generalizing all passive sentence patterns. Type of error becoming the most dominant thing that students do in making noun clauses is misordering, which is changing the position of the subject and the object without considering the passive patterns and verbs that the sentence has. Next, the passive voice which is the most difficult for students to make is that they had difficulty in constructing passive sentences using the main sentence HAVE or GET followed by a non-finite verb (past participle).

This study aims to identify the purposes of passive construction in political news reports. The study also examines how the use of passive voice affects readers' attitudes towards political issues. The use of passive voice can lead to ambiguity, affecting the clarity of meaning by hiding the identity of the doer of the action. However, being vague about the doer of the action is primarily deliberate in political news to serve particular purposes. To collect data, the researchers refer to three newspapers, namely The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian. Some articles discussing political issues were carefully chosen from those newspapers. The analysis of the results reveals that the passive voice is used in the selected political news reports to fulfill four main purposes; first, when the journalist emphasizes the action rather than the doer of the action, he omits by phrase, replacing it with marginal information. Second, when the subject of the sentence is the core of the discussion, the journalist ends the passive sentence with by phrase. Third, passive construction is used when political news writers avoid assigning responsibility to anybody. Fourth, the passive is used in political reports with modal auxiliaries when the writers want to express their opinion clearly about what is possible, necessary, or prohibited. The analysis of results also reveals that the use of passive voice can contribute actively to changing the attitudes and views of the recipients.

It is well known that the differences between the languages and the different levels of relationship between them and the use of the English passive voice in Albanian language are complex achievements of hypotheses given by language thinkers, because the language first of all is a process and processes change from time to time as a result of new language achievements and transformations and as a result of changes in people's worldview. The English and Albanian passive voice do not have a single grammatical structure and that this should be related to numerous legalities that follow the languages in their internal and external development. The studies carried out in terms of linguistic features, even of the passive voice according to the comparative method, have opened new paths to see similarities and differences even in the passive voice structure. This study is intended to give our modest contribution to notice the similarities and differences in the use of the passive voice as well as its structure in both languages. This contrastive analysis tries to facilitate the acquisition of English as a foreign language for students, pupils, to make the translation from English into Albanian and vice versa easier, to provide linguistic information to language researchers. The comparison is supported by the following English novels and their translated versions in Albanian such as: “Oliver Twist” by Charles Dickens and translated by Skënder Luarasi and “Silas Marner” by George Eliot and translated by Ramazan Hysa, where similar as well as different features have been found.

The Correct Use of Passive Voice in Report Writing by Somali SPACE Students in UTM

The passive voice has been commonly used in academic writing for decades. This research aims to investigate the diachronic changes in the use of passive voice in abstracts across four disciplines in natural sciences and social sciences over the past fifteen years. The study corpus comprises 180 abstracts in four disciplines, ranging from 2008-2012, 2013-2017, and 2018-2022. Both tag tools and statistical tools were utilized to reveal the changes in the use of passive voice. The results indicated a slight decline in the use of passive voice in the 180 abstracts over the years, with an increase in natural sciences and a decline in social sciences. Additionally, in the past five years, there has been a discernible difference between the use of passive voice in natural sciences and social sciences, with natural science abstracts containing more passive voice. This research offers insights into changes in passive voice use in abstract writing and contributes to English for Academic Purposes (EAP) instruction.

This study examines the use of passive voice in Philippine police accomplishment reports, analyzing its frequency, functions, and implications. Passive constructions appear in 69% of sentences, predominantly in sections on operations and confiscations. They enhance objectivity by emphasizing actions and outcomes while depersonalizing agents, aligning with institutional neutrality. However, this can obscure accountability and clarity in critical scenarios. Influenced by cultural norms and Philippine English conventions. The passive voice reflects hierarchical and collective values. While supporting professionalism, it risks bureaucratic opacity. Recommendations include strategic training, guidelines for clarity, and audits to strike a balance between transparency and accountability in police reports. Keywords : depersonalization, forensic discourse, institutional language, legal communication, procedural reporting

This study investigated intermediate-level Chinese EFL learners` ability to use three tense-aspect categories in English: simple past, present perfect, and past perfect. Participants (N = 142) were asked to complete three types of controlled tasks: multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and translation, and then to provide an explanation for their answers through group discussions. The findings indicate that although the learners were well acquainted with the tense-aspect forms, they were not able to use them appropriately; past perfect was the most difficult category for both low-intermediate and upper-intermediate learners; they tended to overuse the simple past form when describing events that occurred in the past but their influence has lasted to the present; they often used the present perfect form in sentences containing definite temporal adverbials; and finally, they applied the perfective aspect to the verbs whose lexical aspects import punctuality. These lead to the conclusion that Chinese EFL learners are disposed to rely on L1 translation, tense-aspect consistency in adjacent discourse, and local lexical cues such as temporal adverbials in order to facilitate their understanding of the intricate usage of the English tense-aspect system.

This study empirically analyzes students' ability to identify various types of passive voice (PV) errors through a grammaticality judgment multiple-choice test and examines grammatical errors in constructing the PV in a Chinese-to-English translation (C-E translation) task. The study was conducted among English majors (EM) and non-English majors (NEM) from different universities. The research aims to identify and compare the common error types made by EM and NEM when constructing PV sentences and explore their potential causes. For this purpose, data was collected from a large sample of university students. The findings reveal that errors in passive construction manifest in various forms. The five most common issues are errors in tense, participles, word choice, by-transposition, and the insertion, omission, or misuse of the auxiliary "be". Another significant finding is that, in general, EM performed better than NEM. However, in some specific areas, NEM performed better than EM, which are, the wrong choice of patient-agent and incomplete translation aspects. Based on these results, this study offers pedagogical suggestions for teaching PV to EM and NEM, respectively.

this study aims at describing the linguistics errors that appears in the students' writings and discovering kinds of error the students made in their writings. The subject of this research is taken from the students' writings made by the fourth level students of General English of Intensive English Course Semarang. The result of the data reveals that all the students made some errors in their writings. The types of error the students made are developmental, interlingual, ambiguous or other errors. Developmental errors are errors similar to those made by the students learning the target language as their first language. Then, interlingual errors are similar in structure to a semantically equivalent phrase or sentence in the learner's native language. Meanwhile, ambiguous errors are those that could be classified equally well as developmental or interlingual. Key words: error, developmental, interlingual, ambiguous

This descriptive case study aimed to analyze syntactical, morphological and lexical errors produced by Iranian EFL learners at two different levels of basic and elementary. The proposed hypothesis predicted that there exist considerable differences between the errors produced by the participants with respect to their origin (interlingual, intralingual or developmental errors) as well as the type of error (lexical or grammatical). To this end, four Iranian EFL learners at basic level and four at elementary level, attending English language classes at Iran Language Institute were chosen using purposeful sampling. A test of proficiency was administered to ensure the participants in each group are homogenous regarding the level of proficiency. The participants’ performance in both oral and written activities as well as planned and unplanned ways were meticulously observed and recorded by the researcher in a six-month period. In addition to observation, data were also obtained through interviews and tests given at intervals of every two months to investigate any potential change. The qualitative data were coded, categorized and interpreted cyclically. It was concluded that learners at higher levels of proficiency produced more developmental and intralingual errors than learners at basic levels. Also learners at basic levels produced more interlingual errors. In addition learners at basic levels produced more grammatical errors than learners at elementary levels. On the other hand, learners at elementary level produced more lexical errors.

Seeing that tenses in the English language are distributed and perceived differently from the Serbian ones, this paper deals with the error analysis of tenses in the written tests of the first graders in the Traffic and Transport Engineering High School. The aim of this research is to determine the types of mistake, their sources and causes. The first part of the paper deals with the theory about error analysis, error description, its explanation and detailed error classification and the methodology, whereas the second one focuses on the research itself, the analysis and interpretation of results and the ways of error correction. Regarding error classifications, some authors define the same terms differently (developmental errors) and it is necessary to opt for one definition. In addition to this, in the literature the names of errors that spring from two different sources are not coined except for ambiguous errors (a combination of a developmental and interlingual error). In this paper such errors will be named ambiguous. As for methodology, 75 students aged 15-16 were involved in the study since the author was teaching these students. Therefore, the author can check whether some of the strategies in classroom were successful or not. The subjects enrolled on different vocational profiles and had a modest and low overall score. Most participants have got beginner and elementary level of English even though they had been learning it for eight years in primary school. Apart from the poor knowledge, other factors that impede the teaching and learning processes are undisciplined, unmotivated, uninterested, irresponsible and neglected students. To obtain data, the researcher used a written test including controlled practice - translation exercises and answering basic questions. The results have shown that students tend to make twice as many errors in the form than in the usage. According to the surface structure taxonomy, the former are mostly errors of omission, misformation and addition, the latter are almost all errors of misformation. Considering the source and cause, morphological errors are predominately ambiguous i.e. they cannot be explained using only one source. Surprisingly, the rest of morphological mistakes are intralingual due to false concepts hypothesized whereas there are only few interlingual ones. Errors in usage are almost all intralingual stemming from mostly ignorance of rule restriction and overgeneralization. To reduce the number of errors, an error is a starting point in teaching and learning. After the test, the teacher can interview students individually to answer the same questions to see whether they can notice their own mistakes and state the reason for such a choice. Thus the teacher can discriminate between errors and mistakes. The teacher can also give corrective feedback explicitly in explaining interlingual errors comparing mother tongue and target language and implicitly in explaining intralingual ones using minimal pairs. Given mixed ability classes, students can attend remedial classes where they will practise form-based tasks and additional classes where they will practise usage of tenses. Students can also be handed out pieces of paper containing their mistakes and can do peer-editing. Since dialogue in pairs proved successful, the teacher may include famous film catchphrases and introduce more exercises in terms of listening and speaking. However, at the end of the day, students should take responsibility for their own learning.

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