Problems Faced by Chinese ESL Learners in the Acquisition of English Passive and Recommendations for Teaching

 by Manfred Wu Man-fat, Hong Kong

INTRODUCTION

The English passive has been notoriously difficult for ESL learners. However, a review of past literature indicates that little attention has been given to the teaching of the English passive in the TESOL field, particularly to Chinese-speaking ESL learners. The aim of this article is to fill this pedagogical gap through exploring the difficulties of Chinese L2 learners in acquiring the English passive. The difficulties are identified from the perspective of contrastive analyses between the meanings and uses of passive in Chinese and English. Providing pedagogical recommendations with respect to the instruction of English passive to Chinese ESL learners is another aim of this article.

There are two parts in this article. The first part focuses on identifying the difficulties of Chinese ESL learners in acquiring the English passive. Particular reference is made to how the differences of the treatment of the passive in the Chinese and English languages contribute to the difficulties. The second part of this article focuses on providing pedagogical recommendations for the instruction of the English passive to Chinese ESL learners.

FACTORS CONTRIBUTING TO THE DIFFICULTIES OF CHINESE ESL LEARNERS IN ACQUIRING THE ENGLISH PASSIVE

Several difficulties have been identified: the differences in the semantic and syntactic properties of the English and Chinese passives; the differences in the treatments of animacy, agency verb transitivity in the two languages, the differences in the prevalence of the passive in English and Chinese, and the mastery of English tense and aspects as a pre-requisite to the successful acquisition of the English passive for Chinese ESL learners. They are described separately below:

Semantic Properties

The passive in Chinese is usually used to express unfavourable meanings (Chao, 1968). Lian (1993) also called the Chinese passive an ‘inflictive voice’. This adversative semantic prosody does not exist in the English passive. In English,the passive is used to mark objectivity and a formal style, which are not found in the Chinese passive.

There is evidence to support the above view.  In their contrastive analyses of English and Chinese corpora, McEnery and Xiao (2007) found that the prevalence of the English passive is in the order of neutral, negative, and positive situations, while in Chinese the order of prevalence of situations is negative, neutral and positive. We can see that there are significant differences in the situations in which the passive is used in English and Chinese.

Syntactic Properties

Previous research has identified noted differences in the lexical and syntactic properties between Chinese and English passives.

In both English and Chinese, very often the syntactic features of the passive are not obvious. Kenneth (1993) observed that some sentences in the active voice in English can express a passive meaning. In Chinese, despite a wide range of devices (e.g. bei, rang, jiao, ai, shou, zao) are employed to express passive meaning and very often the devices are not explicit. This creates confusion for Chinese ESL learners in both understanding the meanings of the passive in English and the lexical and syntactic properties.

Findings of the contrastive analyses of English and Chinese corpora by McEnery and Xiao (2007) indicate that the English passives are more frequent in the predicate position. The Chinese passive, on the other hand, can occur not only in the predicate position but also as the subject, object, an attribute or adverbial modifier. This difference may cause Chinese ESL learners to have difficulties in the position of the passive in English.  In Chinese, syntactically marked passives are closely linked to aspect. More specifically, they found that the Chinese passive in the predicate position typically interacts with aspect (‘bei’’… ‘le’). In English, however, the interaction is not so apparent, and all English sentences and clauses are formally marked by combined tense-aspect markers. This difference is related to the intimate relationships between the English passive and tense and aspects, which will be discussed further later on in this article.

McEnery and Xiao (2007) also identified that with the English short passive the ‘by’ is usually left out, while it is retained in the Chinese short passive. Another related issue is that agents in Chinese passives are always very concrete, while in English passives they are usually very vague (e.g., someone). These two differences create difficulties for Chinese learners to learn the short passive, and L2 teachers have to try very hard for Chinese learners to understand that the agent, which usually contains some concrete information, should be omitted in the English passive.

L1 interference creates difficulties for Chinese learners in their learning of the English passive. Chan (1991) provides some examples on the effects of L1 interference. Since English and Chinese passives operate on different rules, she identified two sources of errors for Cantonese learners in learning the English passive: inappropriate use of the passive and failure to use the passive where appropriate. Hinkel (2004) also identified that Chinese-speaking advanced L2 learners of English, among learners from other cultures, had difficulties in learning the English passive in written academic discourse. The conclusion of Han (2000) from his analyses of the pseudo-passive is that it is a form of inter-language caused by L1 influence of Chinese.

What further contributes to the difficulties of Chinese ESL learners in their acquisition of English passive is that in current research there are different kinds of English passives. In addition to the more ‘traditional’ types of long and short passives, there are also other types such as notional passive, pseudo passive, lexical passive and ‘statal’ passive. The situation is even more intriguing as regarding the passive in Chinese, as there is a lack of consensus on what is regarded as passive in the Chinese language (e.g., Huang, 1999; Tang, 2001; Ting, 1998).

Animacy, Agency and Verb Transitivity

Master (1991) was the first to point out that active verbs with inanimate subject nouns can be an obstacle for non-native speakers (NNSs), particularly Asians in acquiring the English passive. The reason is L1 interference. In Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese, animacy very often determines whether active verbs should be used. In English, however, there is no such differentiation. Given this, it is not uncommon for Chinese speakers to have difficulties in understanding why verbs such as ‘arrives’ can be used after inanimate subjects such as a train, as in the sentence: "The train arrives at three o’clock."

Based on Master’s (1991) observation, Hinkel (2002) conducted a series of experiments and gathered evidence for the reasons for the difficulties of learning English passive for NNSs, including Chinese speakers. Based on her evidence, she has drawn some interesting conclusions. The results of her first experiment indicated that NNSs and native speakers (NSs) of English did not elicit differences in their evaluations of different noun sets in terms of animacy. In her second experiment, it was found that there are moderate differences in the evaluations of animacy of nouns between the NNSs and NSs when noun phrases instead of nouns were presented to them. When she asked NNSs and NSs to judge the grammaticality of passive sentences in her third experiment, she found differences between NSs of Asian languages and NSs of English and Spanish. NSs of Asian languages were found to judge sentences with inanimate subjects as passive constructions even though they were active agents. NSs of English, of course, judged the inanimate subjects as active agents. Only two exceptions found in two sentences, in which two animate subjects (‘an elephant’ and ‘dogs’), were included. What is interesting is that NSs of Asian languages were found to have the same judgments as the NSs of English in terms of the grammaticality of the passive. This difference, according to Hinkel (2002), was due to the fact that passive constructions in Chinese, Japanese and Korean are used to describe actions performed by inanimate subjects of an active verb. As far as the Chinese language is concerned, there are no marked differences between active and passive constructions in Chinese and, in Chinese, passive constructions are always overtly marked by particles. In her final experiment, Hinkel (2002) did not pair the active and passive constructions, and participants were given sentences with various syntactic and semantic features of subject nouns and verbs. Findings indicated that certain lexical and syntactic features of verbs such as transitivity and the presence of direct objects contributed to the differences in NNSs’ differences in judging the grammaticality of passive compared to NSs of English.

The above findings suggest that inanimate objects not being able to be an active agent in the Chinese language contribute to the difficulties of Chinese ESL learners in their acquisition of the English passive. This very often causes Chinese ESL learners confusion over the situations in which the English passive should be used.

There are differences in the treatment of the agency between Chinese and English passives. According to McEnery and Xiao (2007), with the English short passive the agent and the ‘by’ are omitted. In Chinese, however, the ‘bei’ is retained because ‘bei’ plays the double role of marking passive constructions and introducing the agent. Another difference is that with the English long passive, the agent follows the passivized verb. In Chinese, the agent occurs before the verb. In Chinese, unlike in English, the agent is usually spelt out.

Knowledge on English transitivity is essential for successful acquisition of the English passive. However, English transitivity poses problems for Chinese learners. In her study on analyzing the errors on transitive verbs made by senior secondary school students in Hong Kong, Chan (1991) found that the errors were due to a direct translation of Cantonese sentences into English. In fact, she argued that both transitive and intransitive verbs exist in the grammar of Cantonese. Direct translation may lead to errors, especially in writing complex sentences. This causes problems for Cantonese learners to acquire the English passive successfully.

Differences in the Prevalence of the Passive between Chinese and English

Findings of the contrastive analyses of English and Chinese corpora by McEnery and Xiao (2007) indicate that passive is ten times more common in English than in Chinese. They give three reasons for this difference in prevalence. Firstly, Chinese passives can only occur in dynamic events. Secondly, as already mentioned before, the Chinese passive has a negative semantic prosody. These two reasons profoundly limit the prevalence of the passive in Chinese. Finally, they mention there is a tendency in English to overuse passives.

As far as the specific forms of passives are concerned, McEnery and Xiao (2007) found that short passives are more frequent than long passives in both the written and spoken forms of English. In Chinese, however, the long passive in the syntactic form was found to be more common, while the short passive was found to be more common in lexical form. Another significant finding is that the passive is less frequent in spoken Chinese. One possible reason they suggested for this is the avoidance of negative semantic prosodies as mentioned in previously.

There are also noted differences in the prevalence of the passive in different genre types in Chinese and English in McEnery and Xiao’s (2007) study. The Chinese passive construction was found to be more prevalent in religious text, mystery/detective stories and the least frequent in news, editorials and official documents. However, in English, the genre types in which Chinese passive were found to be least frequent;y used (i.e., news, editorials and official documents) were found to contain the largest number of passives in English. The negative uses of ‘bei’ passives in literary texts are considerably greater than in newspaper texts (McEnery & Xiao, 2007). Therefore, it is not surprising that most Chinese do not come across the passive ‘bei’ construction as often as NSs in their daily life. Therefore, they might encounter difficulties in acquiring the passive in English.

Mastery of English Tenses and Aspects as Pre-requisites for Successful Acquisition of the English Passive

Another difficulty for Chinese L2 learners to learn the English passive successfully is the thorough mastery of English tenses required for learning the passive. A lot of factors, such as the non-inflected nature of the Chinese language (e.g., Li & Thompson, 1990) and the difference in the concept of time between English and Chinese (Hinkel, 1997), have been identified as the barriers to the learning of English tenses and aspects. As we know, in constructing passive sentences, different forms of the verb ‘to be’ must be added before the past participle form of a verb. Without a strong mastery of the basic tenses and aspects, it would be difficult for learners to construct passive sentences correctly.

What we should pay attention to is that the learning of English tense and aspect is always a major barrier for Chinese L2 learners. Hinkel (2004), in her analyses of the corpora of L1 and L2 academic texts of tertiary students from Asia (including Chinese) and the Middle East, found that even advanced learners who were non-native English speakers had difficulties with the uses of tenses and aspects in their academic writing. In addition, she found that most (of a total of 631 non-native English speakers) of the research participants avoided using passive in their academic writing.

Lack of Comprehensive Teaching and Learning Materials for Learning the English Passive

The piecemeal and inadequate explanations of grammar textbooks are very often pointed out as serious problems for ESL learners to acquire the English passive successfully (see Hinkel, 2004). This is not only true for the advanced level but in the intermediate level. According to Hinkel (2004), in many textbooks on college level and academic writing, there is a lack of reference to the meanings, functions and uses of various English tenses and voices. Equally true is that many grammar textbooks for intermediate ESL learners provide only limited meanings of passive and most of their coverage is on the syntactic formation in their explanations of the English passive (e.g., Murphy & Smalzer, 2000).

The six factors described above contribute to the difficulties of Chinese-speaking L2 learners in learning the English passive. Some of these factors are influences from L1. Therefore, it is not surprising to find that NNSs of English, who have attained a high L2 proficiency, as reflected by their TOEFL scores, still differed significantly from NSs on their grammatical judgments of the English passive construction (Hinkel, 2002).

Despite the seemingly vast differences between the English and Chinese passives, as suggested by McEnery and Xiao (2007), the passive in both languages expresses a basic passive meaning. This means that it is not impossible for Chinese learners to learn the English passive successfully. What is essential is that both learners and teachers have to overcome the difficulties identified in this article. The pedagogical recommendations for the teaching of English are given in the next section.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Equipping Learners with Knowledge on the English Passive

In light of the differences of the two languages in their treatment of the passive, there is a need to distinguish Chinese ESL learners’ difficulties in determining the situations in which the English passive should be used and their difficulties in constructing passive sentences correctly. This implies that instruction on the English passive should have two elements: to familiarize learners with the situations in which the passive should be used, and instruction on the correct lexical and syntactic features of the English passive. This means that, in addition to the focus of the lexical and syntactical structures of the English passive as suggested by most grammar textbooks, there is a need to make explicit to Chinese ESL learners the semantic features of the English passive. For more advanced learners, contrastive analyses of the semantic, lexical and syntactical differences between Chinese and English passives are beneficial.

Explicit instruction was found to be effective for the acquisition of passive construction by Chinese learners. In her controlled experiment on comparing the effects of explicit and implicit instruction of English grammatical structures, Zhou (1989) found that form-based classroom instruction facilitates the acquisition of passive construction. In the explicit method, teachers requested students to work out and articulate grammatical properties and rules, and provide explanations of the properties and rules with metalanguage. She even found evidence for the internalization of grammatical knowledge on the passive. Thus, it is necessary for teachers to inform their learners explicitly of the grammatical structures related to passive constructions.

Since a lot of difficulties in the learning of the English passive construction are related to more fundamental syntactical features of English, there is a need to ensure that L2 learners have a good understanding of these areas before passive constructions can be introduced to them. An example is the functions of verbs as predicates (Levin & Rappaport Hovav, 1991), and the syntactic and semantic properties of subjects and verbs in English (e.g., Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartik, 1985).

Explanations and Revision of English Animacy, Agency and Transitivity

Given the differences in the two languages on their treatment of animacy, agency and verb transitivity, there is a need to equip Chinese ESL learners with these aspects, and how they are related to the English passive.

Based on the findings of her four experiments, Hinkel (2002) provides some suggestions for teaching tertiary students in their academic writing. She suggests that ESL instructors can employ the concept of lexical animacy to allow L2 learners to understand that the distinctions between active and passive constructions are stylistic and common in academic texts in English. Activities such as analysis of excerpts from introductory textbooks and paraphrasing of academic texts can be arranged for L2 learners to become more familiar with the construction of the English passive. She also suggests that the teaching of verb transitivity is necessary. She comments that few ESL grammar textbooks explain the construction of the passive requires a transitive active verb and a direct object. There is a need to equip Chinese ESL learners with these aspects.

Explanations and Revision of English Tenses and Aspects

The mastery of English tenses and aspects is essential in the acquisition of the English passive. Therefore, there is a need for English teachers to ensure learners have a thorough knowledge of them. A recommendation highly related to English tense and aspect is that teachers have to point out to learners the differences in the concepts of time in English and Chinese (Hinkel, 1997).

Development of Materials for the Teaching and Learning of the English Passive for Chinese ESL Learners

Given the lack of available materials in the teaching and learning of the English passive for Chinese ESL learners as mentioned earlier, there is a need to develop materials which take into consideration the features of the Chinese passive and how it is different from the English passive.

The materials should not only include the restricted meanings and the overwhelming coverage of the lexical and syntactic features of the English passive as most available resources at present do. The materials should include explanations of animacy, agency, verb transitivity, and a revision of tenses. There is also a need to explain to learners the situations in which the English passive should be used in addition to the traditional focus of how to form correct passive sentences. The development of this kind of materials can not only benefit Chinese ESL learners but ESL learners of other Asian languages as well, if we remember the similarities of the passive in a lot of Asian languages with that of Chinese as pointed out earlier.

CONCLUSION

From a contrastive perspective, this article suggests six factors contributing to the difficulties of Chinese ESL learners in their acquisition of English passive. Some of these factors have received empirical support, while some are observations only. More research is needed to provide more empirical support for these factors and to determine how important these factors contribute to the difficulties. Below are some conceptual issues and suggested directions for future research.

As pointed out earlier, there is a lack of consensus in the definition of the passive in the Chinese language. In his study on testing the adequacy of traditional approaches in analyzing Chinese passives, Huang (1999) found that there are noted differences in the nature of passives in the passive forms in Mandarin, Taiwanese and Cantonese. More specifically, the short form of get passive exists in Mandarin but not in Taiwanese and Cantonese. Secondly, the adversative passive, which is more common in Taiwanese and Cantonese, is seldom used in Mandarin. Finally, the adversative active that is used in Taiwanese and Cantonese is seldom used in Mandarin. Despite the differences between his findings and the findings of McEnery and Xiao (2007), what we can observe is that the situation is far more complicated than what has been suggested, especially when we remember that there are different views on Chinese passives. To further complicate the situation, linguists in Mainland China and the United States are divided into two camps in their interpretations of passive in Chinese for different reasons (Huang, 1999). More and more different views have been emerging over the last decade (e.g., Ting, 1998; Tang, 2001).

The findings of some previous studies mentioned in this paper (e.g., Hinkel, 2002; McEnery & Xiao, 2007) might over-represent one or two Chinese communities. There is a need to gather more information in this area. Apart from the contrastive analyses as suggested, we also need more empirical evidence as regarding the difficulties faced by Chinese L2 learners in their learning of the English passive.

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© Manfred Wu Man-fat 2007. All rights reserved.