| Passive voice is one of the essential grammatical items in English which is also challenging for many language learners.Different cultural backgrounds and linguistic backgrounds between Chinese and English result in different grammatical systems.Verbs in Chinese lack morphological changes while English verbs have corresponding inflectional changes in active and passive voice.Therefore,the passive voice becomes a significant difficulty for junior high school students and they can inevitably make errors in the use of passive voice.This study focuses on the following two research questions:(1)What are the major categories of errors in the use of English passive voice by junior high school students?(2)What are the major causes that lead to the errors in the use of English passive voice by junior high school students?98 students in Grade 9 of a junior high school in Jiangsu Province are selected as subjects.Based on second language theories such as error analysis and interlanguage,this study makes a careful investigation on the major categories of common errors in the use of passive voice by junior high school students by the means of testing and interviewing.Four types of questions were designed to test students’ acquisition of passive voice,including voice transformation,multiple-choice,binary choice and translation.And interviews are applied to analyzes the major causes that result in the errors and finally,some pedagogical suggestions are given for teaching.Based on the results of the study,there are several findings.Firstly,the types of errors in the use of passive voice can be mainly divided into two categories,structural errors and functional errors.And structural errors can be further divided into three types,errors in past participles,basic sentence structures and tense.Functional errors are under-use errors and over-use errors.Besides,structural errors are slightly more than functional errors.And the structural errors range from high to low:sentence structure>tense>past participles.Over-use errors are far more than under-use errors.Secondly,these errors possibly result from the negative interference of mother tongue,learning environments and students’individual causes,such as learning habits and methods.By the end of the thesis,some suggestions are provided for the learning and teaching of passive voice.First,teachers should create ideal language learning environments.Second,students should develop a positive attitude towards errors in the use of passive voice and have appropriate learning habits and effective learning methods to avoid these errors. |
