Teaching the Passive Through Semantically Enhanced Input

Abstract

This article reports on a small, classroom‐based study exploring the use of a task to teach the passive in an English for specific purposes context. The participants were 34 adult Japanese male learners, all security professionals, ranging in proficiency level from elementary to advanced. The task was designed to highlight the form–meaning connection by creating a need for learners to use the passive, and then introducing a focus on form as the students became aware of the gap in their current interlanguage resources. The task input consisted of a miniature apartment and a set of photos that had been semantically enhanced to elicit passives. Piloting the task with three native speakers (NS) confirmed the input was sufficient to induce a naturalistic use of passives. The data indicate the task was effective for increasing the use of the passive across a range of proficiencies both after the focus‐on‐form phase and in the posttask phase.