A Study Of Common Errors In Passive Voice By Junior High School Students And Corresponding Countermeasures

Passive voice is of vital importance in grammar,and for many junior high students,it is also difficult to master.The main reason is that Chinese and English belong to two completely different grammatical systems.Chinese is a language that lacks morphological changes.Verbs in Chinese do not have morphological changes of tense and voice,and there are not diversified forms of passive voice.While English is a language rich in morphological changes,and its verbs themselves have morphological difference between active voice and passive voice.Due to the asymmetry of the structure between the two languages,Chinese students are inevitably influenced by their mother tongue or other aspects in learning the passive voice of English,which leads to misuse of the passive voice and at the same time increases the difficulty of passive voice teaching.This study is based on second language theories,such as contrastive analysis,error analysis and interlanguage theory.And 150 students and 2 teachers of Grade 4 from a middle school are selected to be the participants.And the major research instruments include test papers,questionnaires and interviews.According to these research methods,the study makes a deep investigation on the errors types,as well as the causes,related to passive voice by junior high school students.There are three research questions:(1)What is the frequency of errors in the use of common passive voice by junior high students?(2)What are the major categories of passive voice errors that junior high students have in learning passive voice?(3)What are the major factors that lead to the errors of passive voice for junior high students?In this thesis,some major findings are made: In the process of passive voice study,for junior high students,the error frequency of three forms of passive voice can rankfrom top to bottom: Passive voice with active form> Sentence structure> Tense.The major categories of passive voice errors can be divided into four types,including incorrect judgment of voice,misuse of tenses,absence and redundancy,and morphological errors of words.These kinds of errors are possibly influenced by such factors as confusion caused by difficult forms of passive voice,negative transference of mother tongue,individual factors and external factors.According to the above conclusion,some constructive suggestions about passive voice are provided for both teachers and students at the end of this thesis.On the one hand,teachers should provide appropriate situational context for students to practice passive voice,develop students' sense of language and ability to use passive voice in English,and increase cultural input of the target language in view of the cultural differences between English and Chinese.On the other hand,students should cultivate appropriate learning ability,have a proper attitude towards passive voice and treat errors with positive attitude,and have a good learning habit to avoid morphological errors of words.