The Sesotho passive voice: A significant resource for witnesses in Lesotho commissions of inquiry

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:

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.

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 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.

Background: This study adopted a corpus-linguistics approach to investigate the gender effects in students’ technical and scientific writing. Specifically, we analyzed whether gender influenced how males and females used adverbs (e.g., very, really , and definitely ) and passive voice (e.g., the article was published in the journal ). The overuse of both adverbs and passive voice has been associated with poor writing clarity and concision. Literature review: Previous research works on gender effects in language have been mixed. Since these are all the essential elements of effective technical communication, teachers need to know what gender effects might exist. Research questions are as follows: 1. Does gender influence the student writers’ use of adverbs? 2. Does gender influence the student writers’ use of passive voice? Methodology: The sample included 87 writers (46 females and 41 males) who contributed to a 757,533-word corpus. Researchers analyzed 12,111 instances of adverbs and 4,732 instances of passive voice within a variety of technical texts. Results/discussion: Female writers used significantly more adverbs as well as more additive/restrictive, degree, and stance adverbs than expected. Male writers used more linking and manner adverbs than expected. Female writers also used significantly more passives, particularly passive verbs associated with reporting findings and interpretation. In contrast, male writers associated with passive verbs used to describe methods and analyses. Overall, the results suggested that females and males used the same style markers to fulfill different rhetorical functions.

Writing scientific articles like a native English speaker: top ten tips for Portuguese speakers

Objective To analyze and compare the characteristics of English sentence structures in national medical journals and foreign medical journals to improve the level of English writing. Methods Comparison was made in respectively 17 English abstracts from foreign and national medicine periodicals.Analysis involved text length(sentences), sentence types, tenses, and passive voice in the abstracts.Statistic processed in our study. Results It was showed that in terms of sentence type selection, the usage rate of compound sentences in foreign journals was higher than that of national journals (P<0.01). In terms of passive voice use, foreign journals were generally more current and generally used in the past than national journals.The difference was statistically significant (P<0.05 or<0.01). The use of passive voice in national journals was higher than that of foreign journals (42.27% vs 27.59%, P<0.01). Conclusions National medicine periodicals should verify the sentence types, avoid the use of passive voice. Key words: Medical journals; Abstract; Writing; Styles

This study aims to analyse the science textbooks for teachers and students of junior high school students. The method used in this research is a qualitative method that used text analysis as a content analysis. The issue of school science textbooks has been a major research topic within the science education research tradition. The analysis of textbooks is divided into three formality values, namely: terminology and notation, nominalisations, and the use of passive voice. The categories of terminology and notation for teachers’ book and students’ book showed the result of high (H) value, the nominalisations for teachers’ book and students’ book also showed the result of high (H) value. Meanwhile, the use of passive voice for teachers’ book and students’ book showed the result of a low (L) value. By nominalising verbs in writing, more information can be packed into each clause so that the noun phrases can extend and carry more content. On the other hand, the analysis showed the result of low value in the use of passive voice while the verbs in passive voice appeared less than the verbs in the active voice. The result also showed weak power relationship and weak involvement in both textbooks. The weak power (hierarchical) relationship was shown by more occurrences of interrogatives and declarative rather than imperatives in both textbooks. Meanwhile, the weak involvement was shown by the frequency of the use of personal pronouns (more use of plural personal pronouns than singular ones). In conclusion, the analysis in both Chemistry textbooks (teachers’ book and students’ book) in the content of acid and base was high value in the formality markers of both terminologies, notation, and the nominalisations.

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.

In requirements engineering literature dealing with natural language specifications, we usually find writing rules like ‘avoid passive voice’ or ‘do not use weak words’. Adhering to such rules should result in understandable and unambiguous requirements. Passive voice, especially when used without an explicit actor, is considered to result in incomplete requirements. The usage of weak words is considered to result in imprecise requirements that are hardly testable. But is the inversion of the claim correct, i.e. does the violation of the writing rules result in problematic specifications? At least in our environment (the passenger car development of Mercedes-Benz) we observe that authors often use passive voice, and there are many requirements containing weak words. To answer this question, we conducted an empirical investigation whose results we report in this paper. The results of this investigation are quite surprising: The use of passive voice, even when the actor is missing, is almost never problematic, as the missing information (the actor) can in most cases easily derived from the context (i.e. surrounding requirements or the general project context). The usage of weak words may be considered problematic in approximately 12% of all occurrences. For an automatic analysis on weak words linguistic patterns can be defined to detect these problematic occurences.

Researchers often find that there are students' error' in using passive on writing texts. Applying proper grammar in writing recount text is usually a problem for students. The purpose of this study was to clasify the errors and the causes of English Literature students in using passive voice on their recount text writings at Pamulang University. Qualitative descriptive method was used to approach the data. The population in this study are about 200, third semester students of Unpam English Literature Department. Researchers take 20 students to represent the population sample with purposive sampling technique. The instrument is students’ recount texts. Researchers ask students to write down their unique experiences. Researchers collect data, identify data, classify passive voice errors and explain the causes of students’s errors in using passive voice on recount text. Students’ errors are classified into four categories based on the types of errors, they are omission errors, addition errors, misformation errors, and misordering errors. After finishing this research, researchers are expected to enrich lecturer and student knowledge and improve students' ability in useing passive sentences in writing recount text, and to find out the types and the causes of students' errors in using passive sentences in writing recount texts.

Previous psycholinguistic findings showed that linguistic framing – such as the use of passive voice - influences the level of agency attributed to other people. To investigate whether passive voice use relates to people’s personal sense of agency, we conducted three studies in which we analyzed existing experimental and observational data. In Study 1 (N = 835) we show that sense of personal agency, operationalized between participants as recalling instances of having more or less power over others, affects the use of agentive language. In Study 2 (N = 2.7 M) we show that increased personal agency (operationalized as one’s social media followership) is associated with more agentive language. In Study 3 and its two replications (N = 43,140) we demonstrate using Reddit data that the language of individuals who post on the r/depression subreddit is less agentive. Together, these findings advance our understanding of the nuanced relationship between personal and linguistic agency.